Workend

Weekends at Harvard are usually considered sacred to football games and cocktail parties, but the half-dozen Harvard men who trouped down to Cambridge Community Center last Saturday, where they were joined by students from Radcliffe, B. U., Wheaton, and Wellesley, broke firmly with the tradition of decorative idleness. They occupied themselves during a seven-hour day with c carpentering, painting, and doing odd jobs in the rambling, converted school building which houses Cambridge's only colored settlement, and they spent the evening discussing and planning future "Weekend Work Camps," urban and rural, for which they expected to recruit several times their number from colleges in the Greater Boston area.

The work camp movement, initiated by the establishment of summer camps lasting from four to eight weeks, first in Europe and then in this country, has only recently extended to weekend "camps," during the winter. The summer camps, conducted by the Friends, International Student Service, and independent groups, bring together young people of differing backgrounds to work on some project of definite value, usually in an underprivileged community. The work is most commonly manual labor, and is supplemented with a study of the region in which the camp is situated, by means of trips, lectures, and discussions.

The values which work camps have for their campers-laboratory practice in social science, first hand knowledge of manual labor, satisfaction in contributing to the welfare of a community, and experience in living and working with people from every sort of social and economic environment-can be carried over to weekend projects without too much loss of effectiveness, and summer campers seem to feel that those values were sufficiently important that every effort should be made to carry them over.

Even a confirmed believer in the cocktail party theory of weekends might find the experience worthwhile, and even exciting. He would learn that the art of building a work-bench is as difficult to master as the conjugation of the aorist, although much more fun, and that a discussion of race discrimination will really keep him sitting on the edge of his chair when talking to a boy who has been trying to find a job in a Cambridge defense industry, and whose ability he has learned to respect after a day of hard work together. And our skeptic might change his mind about weekends.