Kids Should Be Blindfolded and Dropped in the Woods at Night
Blindfolded kids, driven off in a car, and dumped into the woods at night. In America, we call that a crime. In the Netherlands? It's called a "dropping," and it's a beloved childhood tradition.
"It's a rite of passage," says Mark Pols, an investor living in Silicon Valley who grew up in Holland. When he was a kid, Pols says, droppings (pronounced drope-ings) were always a part of scouting—and still are. "There'd be various degrees of challenge, meaning what time of night, how far away you'd get dropped, how few people you'd get dropped with, etc."
Pols' first dropping was at age 11, which seems typical. He was in a group of five or six kids, all blindfolded and dropped well past sundown at some distance from the scout camp. "In our case, we had a little crude map and the purpose was to find a road and navigate your way back," Pols says. "It was really exciting because it was dark and we were given one flashlight. Maybe we had to walk a mile or something, but it felt really far and scary."
In some camps, then and now, staffers accompany the kids but hang behind so the campers have to figure out the route on their own. "We don't help the kids go in the right direction at all," says Birgit Hartkamp, a sales rep in Utrecht who grew up going to an astronomy camp that did droppings and later became a counselor there. "At one point I made the kids walk in a circle for five hours and then they realized they were 200 meters from the place they had to be. I knew it the whole time."
