Translations:The Century Magazine, 1921 (article)/29/en

I have always been impressed by the spiritual waste of those first eighteen repressed and distorted years of my life. I covet for all boys and girls some short cut to the things I had to learn slowly and painfully. Over twenty-five years ago I found myself asking, “Is n’t there some way to dramatize this religion, this education, this life of the out-of-doors which has, indeed, meant life to me?” I wanted to help boys and girls find that short cut. The upshot of this questioning was the Woodcraft idea of which the editor has asked me to tell in this paper.