Why wilderness? Because the average student spends an average of five hours a week outside, resulting in what’s being referred to as the “Indoor Generation” or the iGen. Put simply, the Colorado Outward Bound School changes lives through challenge and discovery.
It is in this space where are able to learn, grow, debrief, and transfer those lessons back to life at home, school, work, and our communities. In an effort to support the whole child, the whole person, a COBS experience challenges us to focus on qualities like character, leadership, and service-away from the clutter and chatter of everyday life. The Colorado Outward Bound School goes beyond academics, utilizing the wilderness as a test kitchen for success and failure. This is how we build the leaders of tomorrow. Both schools foster an environment where our students are challenged and supported to become leaders and good team members, where an ethos of service is paramount, and where self-reliance and collaboration converge to create a strong community. I think often of the legacy, vision, and values shared by Colorado Academy and the Colorado Outward Bound School.
Outward Bound entities serve a quarter of a million people each year in more than 30 countries. Outward Bound continues to this day, and is now part of a national network of Outward Bound Schools in the United States and all over the world. Many CA students in the 1960s took part in those courses. COBS began running wilderness courses out of Marble, Colorado in 1962, and Chuck realized his vision of being a pioneering leader in the field of experiential education in the United States. Having seen it in action, Froelicher recruited three other Colorado legends-Charlie Gates, Bill Coors, and Ruthie Brown-and together, they launched the Colorado Outward Bound School (COBS). It placed equal emphasis on development of character, leadership, and a sense of service with intellectual studies. The curriculum of the program was founded on the principles developed by Hahn at the Gordonstoun School in 1934. It was a monthlong course that would foster “physical fitness, enterprise, tenacity, and compassion among British youth.” Holt and Hahn agreed to name this school Outward Bound. “I would rather,” he said, “entrust the lowering of a life-boat in mid-Atlantic to a sail-trained octogenarian than to a young sea technician who is competently trained in the modern way but has never been sprayed by saltwater.” At this, educator Kurt Hahn proposed starting a new kind of school in Aberdovey, Wales. The program was called Outward Bound.Īs World War II began sweeping across Europe in 1939, Lawrence Holt, a partner in a large merchant-shipping enterprise, insisted that faulty training was the cause of many seamen’s unnecessary deaths in the Battle of the Atlantic. In 1961, Froelicher visited a new training program for soldiers in Europe and found the model so fitting for young people that he brought the program to the United states, establishing it first in the U.S. Too, it is inextricably tied to former CA Head of School, Chuck Froelicher.
The tradition of Interim is decades old, and is tied to one of my favorite little-known facts about CA. This tradition of embedding a weeklong outdoor or out-of-the-classroom experience in a student’s education is part of the fabric of CA’s history and philosophy. It is the time of year at Colorado Academy when faculty are preparing their Interim trips, and students are perusing our spring outdoor adventure catalogs.
0 kommentar(er)
