The end of all good camp training is to develop in boys and girls the ability to spend an indefinite period of time in the woods with minimum equipment and supplies and yet be thoroughly busy and happy and at the same time healthy and comfortable, according to Werner.

Although he recommends camping as part of school curriculums, Werner emphasizes the fact that a summer camp is not a school. It must, above all, be a glorious, happy experience, with learning as a by-product. To learn campcraft, handicraft, the use of tools and equipment and how to be master of a situation by a knowledge of material resources is education by doing that leads from interest to voluntary study and self-discipline.

“Children who are keenly interested and feel an immediate or near future need will study without the substitute props of competitive examinations and prodding by teachers,” he adds.

Not the least of the value of summer camps is the opportunity it affords for parents and children to be separated for a time, Werner declares. It is mutually beneficial for each of them to have purely individual interests, he says, and to prove that he practices his own preaching he is making preparations to send his own 8-year-old son to a camp other than his own. “He needs to get away from his parents as much as any other child,” he explains.

Enrollment in Camp Ironwood, deep in the Maine woods, is limited each summer to 40 boys. Many of them go from St. Louis and others from Eastern cities. Sometimes Werner takes a bus load of boys for a trip around the Great Lakes en route to the camp. While he has direction of the boys’ camp, his wife looks after a small group of girls in a camp across the lake. Mrs. Werner does not designate her work as that of a real summer camp, as the group is always less than ten, which is too small for a formal camp program.

Leisure time is America’s greatest undeveloped resource, Werner contends, and it is an essential part of every child’s education to develop such a broad field of interests that he will never be at a loss for something to do when he grows up beside going to picture shows, listening to the radio and playing cards.

The summer camp, he concludes as he begins, at the present time offers the greatest educational opportunity at hand. Not until every child, rich and poor, has the chance to spend some time each year in nature’s own setting, to learn under wise direction the lessons taught by spontaneous play and the following of his own interests, will the modern educations system best serve the coming generations, he contends.

For a young man who turned his back on college to make learning more agreeable for the neighbor’s children, he has done well in 12 years in creating outstanding educational organizations that may in time revolutionize the conventional school system.

Free camps for school children is his first objective.