| New
Perspectives
- Aug, 1991 Issue |
Catherine Freer Wilderness
Survival School
Albany, Oregon
(503) 967-8722
Director: Robert Cooley, Ph.D
This short-term, wilderness
based school has been running for three years, owned by Oregon River
Expeditions, Inc. It is a 21 day, outward Bound based approach, and
its $3,420 tuition makes it one of the least expensive programs of its
type. Director and Founder Rob Cooley, a clinical psychologist, tells
me it is licensed as a residential Alcohol and Drug Treatment program
which helps a high percentage of clients collect insurance for the tuition,
especially Oregon residents.
The following is taken from
their literature, "Helping Adolescents Achieve their Potential."
"Our modern society is so
complex that our children often are truly unaware that society is based
on a underlying fabric of honesty, responsibility, reliability, hard
work and mutual cooperation. They see people who fail to adhere to these
virtues doing very well for themselves; they have experienced that their
own failure to follow these principles may result in short-term gains
and that nothing collapses. Society goes on, and the students are not
expelled from school (or they are, but fail to see the long-term consequences
of that), they do not go hungry or suffer from exposure, they usually
do not have to deal with the anger of close comrades who depend on their
performance. A not unreasonable conclusion is that one's behavior is
unimportant to the larger community, and even has little effect on the
course of one's own life.
Living in a small group under
natural primitive conditions soon brings a change in perception: if
I don't cook I don't eat; if we don't all hike well, we don't get to
the next food drop on schedule and go on short rations for a day or
two; if we don't attend carefully to demonstrations on edible plants,
a constant diet of lentils and rice gets pretty dull; if we don't help
each other with camping and setting up shelters, a wet, cold night shivering
by the fire may result. And in the outdoors, these consequences are
meted out not by some authority figure of questionable motives and fairness,
defending an abstract, and to an adolescent, often rather senseless
set of social 'rules;' but rather by Nature herself, in her simple,
direct, impersonal, unarguable way: pay attention, take care, work hard,
cooperate, or suffer cold, heat exhaustion, hunger, a sleepless night.
We believe that extended periods
of wilderness living in small groups can be a treatment-enhancing addition
for most adolescent programs and will become standard within a few years.
Wilderness living provides a naturally healing environment, the physical
activity and health that are especially important to adolescents, the
best available means to promote self-exploration and self-esteem, and
a setting where the meaning of daily work, play and relationships, as
well as life's larger spiritual issues, are naturally occurring issues."
Copyright
© 1991, Woodbury Reports, Inc. (This article may be reproduced without
prior approval if the copyright notice and proper publication and author
attribution accompanies the copy.) |
