and no hatchets allowed!

Well, thank God I didn't pack the hatchet. You know, the one I carry with me everywhere. Hatchets, you see, are on the "DO NOT BRING" list of items for sixth grade camp, to which my daughter will be departing in a few hours. Some of the items make sense--don't bring aerosols, electronics, etc.--because you know those are the kinds of things kids might well be inclined to tuck into their duffle bags to take with them for the week. But hatchets? Has this really ever been a problem in the past?

Sixth Grade Camp, I gather, is the latest innovation in our ever-changing educational curriculum. All the schools are doing them. I'm wondering what county supervisor decreed this piece of idiocy, but being an educator myself, I'll bet anything it's related to the idea of the "culminating experience"--the latest catchphrase in education departments peopled with "Ph.ds" who have no actual expertise in anything at all other than telling you how to teach your own field of expertise. The "culminating experience" is supposed to be the thing that pulls all a student's long hard hours of effort in learning together and makes it all worthwhile. We're required to have one now in our Masters Program. Nevermind that a Masters Thesis has been a venerated tradition proving the mastery over your field for centuries since the Middle Ages and has been required by our own department and just about everyone else's for hundreds of years. Now it's all brand new, and it's not just a thesis, but a "culminating experience," which is, of course, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. The culminating experience no longer is about demonstrating mastery over a body of knowledge, but simply experiencing it--with the expectation that, as in a novel, there will be a gradual build-up of anticipation an excitement until BOOM! And next thing you know, you're thinking, "Wow that was good!"

But now culminating experiences are everywhere. You don't need to be a Masters Student to have one; you just need to be a sixth grader. So now, at the end of sixth grade, we are expected ship our children off to wherever/whatever we've got within reasonable driving distance that can be contorted into some sort of justification for a learning experience, and we kiss them goodbye for a week. No contact allowed.

I'm really not on board with this week-long camping trip business at all. Fer cryin' out loud: these kids are eleven. Do they really need to spend a week away from home at this age, getting culminated? Does that really improve the learning? If we were on the east coast and a week-long field trip meant you got to visit historical sites and other things not available at home and the like, that'd be one thing. In that case of course it makes sense to do overnight camp. But just for a trip to the local mountains? Come on.

But week-long overnight camp seems to be the trend among elementary schools. Sixth-grade camp is what they're all doing. Probably some supervisor somewhere got it into their head that this is the latest trend in education, because I' been noticing the cropping up of camps obviously designed just for this purpose absolutely everywhere in our local mountains. Sixth-grade camp is a brand new industry.

And so it was that parents were giving a detailed list of rules and items not to be brought under any circumstances to this week's camp, and right there on the top was "NO HATCHETS."

Now, really. How many parents actually send their kid off with a hatchet?

The thing is, you know these things only ever appear on these sorts of lists once someone's actually gone and done it. And then you've got the county board of supervisors saying, "Well, I guess we didn't actually tell them not to do it, so we may have a liability issue here...."

They don't tell kids not to bring cherry bombs, though, so I guess those are still okay.