A Six-Decade Head Start on Growing Good Humans

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a group of teenagers a few days into a canoe trip. The phones are gone. The group chats are gone. What's left is the sound of a paddle dipping into water, the smell of woodsmoke, and the slow return of something that modern adolescence has been steadily eroding: the ability to simply be present.

Every school year at Rosseau Lake College begins this way. The whole school heads out for a five-day outtrip in the parks that surround campus. Each grade has its own experience: canoeing in Algonquin Park, learning whitewater skills on the Ottawa River, hiking through Killarney, kayaking on Georgian Bay. For five days, no one is on campus. Everyone is outside, together.

Then the school year settles into its normal rhythm on the 56 forested acres along Lake Rosseau, and that same quiet carries through. It isn't an accident. It's the point. It has been the point since before anyone was worried about screens at all.

That idea goes back to 1967, when the school's founding board set out to prepare young people for the decades ahead with courage and understanding. They found their leader in R.H. Perry, an expert canoeist, amateur naturalist and career educator who had already helped write the national canoeing standards. Perry built the school on the ideas of the German educator Kurt Hahn, whose thinking helped shape Outward Bound and who believed that qualities like curiosity, resilience and compassion were built through experience, not lectures. Relying on your own skill and judgment against real conditions, Perry believed, changes how you experience everything else in life, including the work in a classroom.

Nearly sixty years later, that founding instinct looks less like an old-fashioned idea and more like foresight. Young people today are more connected than any generation in history. They are also growing up with an unprecedented amount of their social lives, entertainment and information mediated through screens. The question isn't whether technology is good or bad. It's what might be missing when so much of life happens through a device.

RLC offers something deliberately different. The natural world isn't the destination; it's the catalyst. A math lesson can happen on a dock, a conversation about a novel on a trail, a French class where Grade 7 and 8 students learn about Métis culture outside, making scones and bannock instead of reading about it.

At RLC, experiential learning asks students to do what good academic learning has always asked them to do: observe carefully, ask questions, solve problems, make connections, test their assumptions and figure things out. A student navigating a river is making decisions with incomplete information. A student working through a difficult problem in mathematics is doing something remarkably similar. Both require patience, judgment, adaptability and a willingness to try again when the first answer doesn't work.

Being present isn't the endpoint, though. It's the precondition for something more lasting: real thinking, real growth, real learning. A calm, grounded mind makes room for character and academic growth alike; it's hard to be generous, curious, or bold when you're distracted. It's the same argument Perry and Hahn were making sixty years ago. Presence isn't a soft skill. It's the foundation good thinking, and good character, are built on.

"Presence isn't a soft skill. It's the foundation good thinking and good character are built on."

You can see it in the moments a challenging, hands-on experience produces that a lecture rarely can. Three days into a hiking trip, the weather turns and someone's morale collapses, and the rest of the group has to decide, without an adult immediately stepping in to smooth it over, how to rally around that person and keep moving forward together. Those are the qualities RLC hopes students can carry with them: thoughtful, persuasive, adventurous, creative, self-aware, and community-minded. They aren't taught from a textbook. They're practiced, on the water, in the woods, in a boarding house, in a classroom discussion, until they become who a student actually is by graduation.

A screen can simulate connection. It cannot replicate the particular, embodied experience of steering a canoe through whitewater rapids with your paddle partner counting on you. It cannot recreate the quiet that comes after a long day outside, when a group of teenagers sits around a fire and, eventually, starts talking about something that actually matters. That kind of unhurried closeness is where community and belonging actually takes root at RLC. It has been woven into the school since Perry first stepped on campus.

The world has changed enormously since 1967. The challenges young people face are different. Technology has transformed how we communicate, learn and understand the world. But the basic work of growing up hasn't changed. Young people still need challenge. They still need responsibility. They still need other people. They still need opportunities to fail without being defined by failure, to solve real problems, to discover their own strengths and to learn that their choices affect the people around them.

None of it is really new to the school that built its identity on this land nearly sixty years ago. What Perry and Hahn understood intuitively, decades before anyone worried about screens, was the value of a calm, connected, natural setting for real learning and for the kind of person who shows up for others, on an expedition, in a classroom and in life. 

RLC calls this growing good humans, one of the four pillars in the school’s current strategic plan. In an era of constant distraction, that clarity may be the most valuable thing a school can teach. Rosseau Lake College has simply had a six-decade head start.

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