Humanism Now | Secular Ethics, Curiosity and Compassionate Change

65. CampQuest UK Returns! How Kids Camps Build Confidence, Community, and Critical Thinking

Humanise Live Season 1 Episode 65

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0:00 | 30:27

“It was a very safe space to be able to say, I got that wrong.”

CampQuest UK Programme Director Alistair Lichten (Humanist Dad) and camper-turned-volunteer Katy Pugh join Humanism Now to unpack why a secular camp matters, and how a weekend of outdoor adventure, hands-on science, and Philosophy for Children helps young people practise curiosity, confidence, and respectful disagreement.

Discover CampQuest UK

Topics we cover

 ✔︎ Why CampQuest began, and what a secular camp offers that most camps do not
 ✔︎ How outdoor challenge makes speaking up feel less scary
 ✔︎ The 2026 family camp, and what the weekend format looks like
 ✔︎ Philosophy for Children: stimulus, question-voting, and “speaking object” rules
 ✔︎ Encouraging values without dogma: standards of behaviour that protect freedom of thought
 ✔︎ What kids actually take home: reasoning, confidence, and not taking disagreement personally
 ✔︎ Alumni impact, volunteer growth, and rebuilding community year to year
 ✔︎ Practical booking and arrival expectations for the May bank holiday camp

Resources & further reading

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Music: Blossom by Light Prism

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

James Hogson:

Welcome to the Humanism Now podcast, a show about secular ethics, curiosity, and compassionate change. I'm your host, James Hodgson. Our listeners in the US may already be familiar with CampQuest, a long-running secular curiosity-led summer camp where children explore ideas, values, and big questions through fun, friendship, and discovery, all in a safe and supportive environment. I'm pleased to say that, as of the Maybank Holiday 2026 here in the UK, CampQuest is returning to the UK. The camp offers a values-led space where children and families can explore curiosity, community, and critical thinking without dogma, all with plenty of adventure along the way. To find out more about this year's camp, I'm joined by two of the organizers, Alistair Lichten, Programme Director at CampQuest UK and the author of the Humanist Dad blog, and Katie Pugh, who attended the very first UK Camp Quest as a child and has since returned as a volunteer, helping to organize the camp for a new generation of young minds. Together, we'll be exploring what families can expect, what children gain, and why spaces like these matter for raising thoughtful, confident, and independent young people today. Alistair and Katie, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now. Thanks so much for having us. So, Alistair, for listeners who are not familiar, what is CampQuest and what makes it different from a typical summer camp?

Alastair Lichten:

CampQuest started as a movement in the United States. I believe its first camp was in 1996. And it was at the time very much a reaction to discrimination. So the Boy Scouts in America discriminate against gay campers, gay volunteers, and required people to be Christian because of their involvement with the Mormon church. America also has, different to the UK, a really strong summer camp culture. Most kids, the idea that you go away for camp for two weeks, and a lot of parents found it really difficult to find any sort of camp, whether that was outdoors camp, a skate camp, an arts camp that doesn't have some sort of Christian involvement. So wanting a secular option, parents in the United States started the Camp Quest movement, and that's been going ever since. And they do large-scale camps at many different places across the US and North America. In 2009, around 2009, that was the first Camp Quest UK, and which Katie was one of our campers at. And that was organized by very much the driving force behind that was Samantha Stein. She's gone on to be an entrepreneur in other areas. And it was during that very specific new atheist movement that this idea for a secular camp came to the UK. There were quite a lot more local groups of humanist groups, sceptics, atheists in the Parbit Security groups, and the idea of doing a summer camp appealed very much to those people. The UK is obviously a very different environment to the United States. We don't have that same summer camp culture. We've got more Boy Scouts, girl guides type thing, and family holidays, partly because we actually just have more paid leave, luckily, in this country. But despite those differences in culture, people who are secular, who are free thinkers, who want to raise curious kids who are really engaged in thinking about big philosophical issues, they still want community and they still want values-based activities. CampQuest UK ran for 10 years and did many of those things. We also did some online stuff during the pandemic, but we'll just say we ran for 10 years. That's probably a bit cleaner there. Our approach is to provide an inclusive and nurturing environment for young people. And really crucially, there's this mix of physical and traditional camp activities, going in the lake if you're doing an activity center, camp cooking, potentially pulling up tents depending on the exact setting, building stuff, all those kind of traditional camp activities, but to mix that with sessions which are focused on personal, philosophical or scientific discovery. So that might be a science experiment, like extracting your DNA. It might be a philosophical discussion around in a circle using various techniques.

Katy Pugh:

And my friends went off to maybe a church summer camp, or maybe they went to a kind of activity summer camp, and I went to Camp Quest, and we all had very similar experiences. We met new people, we made new friends, we did lots of activities, we learned something new. It was all very similar from that point of view. It was good fun.

James Hogson:

So for parents or young people, again, who haven't attended this camp or maybe any summer camp before, and they had no expectations, what does the experience actually look like and feel like over the course of the camp? How long does it run for? What's the setup and you know, the activities that you're planning for this first camp?

Alastair Lichten:

So that's different in different camps and has evolved over time. I remember my first experience when I came into CampQuest, it'd been running for a few years and it had everything down and it its approach worked out. But things are different now. This is a kind of a fresh start. Well, we were running continually. CampQuest offered residential summer camps. So young people, if you were the junior camp, it might be a long weekend. If you were the senior camp, that's the teenagers. It's a sort of we met at King's Cross Station on a Monday. We traveled up to the campsite, we came back down, parents picked them up on the Friday. It's important to say that this year, our 2026 camp, because it's a relaunch, it's a family camp. So it's going to look a bit different. Young people will be arriving with their families over this long weekend. It's a two-night camp. We're not at a full activity center, we're at a smaller scale campsite. But what we're really thinking about is with some of the activities paired back, what is the core camp quest experience? How do we give people over three days rather than over five days a really clear taste of that and what that means? And at camps, when they turn up, some kids can be taken aback by the amount of freedom and freedom in terms of physical freedom of how they want to engage with the activities, the time they maybe have between activities to be in self-directed, to getting to know, just making friends, and also the intellectual freedom of the conversations, and either engage been able to engage in deep philosophical conversations before. They may at school had the idea that being really curious and excited about science or philosophy is terribly uncool, and kids at first can be nervous because maybe they're away from home. With this family camp, they won't be away from their families, but they might be doing new activities they've never done before, or maybe nervous about how other people see them doing that. They also may be nervous about speaking out in a group conversation, and many of them have this idea, which we really saw, particularly with the senior camps, this sort of the need to be cool and cynical. And then I really think the genius of mixing the two types of activities we do. Once you've been dumped in the lake and you've got soaked through, or you've climbed up a ladder and you've jumped down or am selled, once you do that, talking out in a discussion and saying what you really think or feel, that feels a little bit less scary.

James Hogson:

And Katie, just following up on that, with this latest camp, the relaunch in the Mayback holiday, what ages is the family camp aimed for? And what are some of the specific activities that you have planned?

Katy Pugh:

The ages is a bit more than we've had in the past because the parents will be there. But we're looking for a child that's old enough to engage in a philosophical discussion. And that's probably a bit younger than everyone thinks. You think, oh, a 12-year-old can't do that, but a 12-year-old definitely can do that. And for me as a 12-year-old, it was a great opportunity to be able to talk about my ideas, to think about my ideas and have them challenged and maybe change my mind and maybe drift a bit away from what my parents think. It's probably the first time you've had quite a deep conversation where your parents aren't involved. And even at the family camp, there'll still be opportunities to have those discussions away from parents. So we're looking at things like maybe building some rockets, something cool like that, alongside some one of the main things we've done in CampQuest in the past is something called philosophy for children. So that's where it's a structured way to help children learn how to have philosophical discussions and how to develop critical thinking skills. And you talk about different levels of questions and how to get from why is the sky blue to something like, is Theseus' ship still the same ship? Then you move on to is my body still the same body? And you start to get into these deeper questions, which you'd say, oh, 12-year-olds can't have that conversation, but they absolutely can. It's open to, I'd say the peak age is maybe, and this is where I actually don't know the answer. I'm really sorry, what is the age we're going for? Exactly.

Alastair Lichten:

I think 11 to 11 to 16 is probably the real peak age. If because it's a family camp and we're a big part, this is an evaluation to see what works and see how it's that you want to proceed for future years. If you were thinking of coming and your kid is younger than 11, then definitely look into coming because we had discussed with you there might be some of the activities that say we can't really have them, we can't have a child that young taking part in this activity because of our health and safety stuff. But they will be able to be there with you and experiencing glorious peak district where we are and having fun and having fun as well. If you've got a kid who's maybe a little bit older, 70, 17 or 18, the way in which they participate in some of the activities in the conversation, they maybe is maybe a little bit more with the adults, and and some of the activities will be more child-focused. We've got our rough outline and we're discussing our ideas, and that will be because of the smaller scale, we can customize that based exactly on who's coming more than we have in previous years. But it's there's always in the lead up to Camp Quest, the volunteers have their things that they're doing, and we've been really lucky over the years that I can't do I can't do any chemistry experiment, chemistry experiments. I wouldn't know how to make a chemistry experiment fun. I made a volcano with my kids, that's about it. But we have people who can do that, and whoever whatever the exact mixed activities, I think we're gonna have a really great time.

James Hogson:

Katie, we've touched on the fact that you've been an attendee at the camp and you must have enjoyed it to want to return as an organizer as well. What attracted you to Camp Quest and what are some of the main things which you gained from that experience?

Katy Pugh:

So this is a funny question because I did not choose to go to CampQuest the first year. My grandparents saw it in the newspaper. So the first year there was loads of media around it. And my grandparents saw it in the newspaper and thought that sounds like something we'd like our granddaughter to do. And so off they sent me on my very first CampQuest. Interestingly, I've since talked to other people about how they first came to Crank Quest, and it's not that unusual that people found it online themselves when they were a young teenager looking through I want to do something science-y, found CampQuest themselves. I think people have come to it in a variety of different ways. But more often than not, it's been parents who have said, I want my children to have something different, maybe somewhere they can be enthusiastic about science in a way they don't get at school. But past my first year, for me, the thing that kept me coming back was the chance to be enthusiastic about things that weren't cool at school. You could be really enthusiastic about a nerdy science topic and then move to a philosophical debate where for the first time people were challenging my ideas and I was actually learning something about my own critical thinking skills. And I think that's the case for lots of people at Camp Crest. Is for me, I didn't have those kind of discussions any other week of the year, and it was really great to be able to engage with people that thought differently to me and to learn how to respectfully disagree because I respected the way they'd come to their conclusion because they had also thought it through. And as a 14-year-old, you don't talk about those kind of things at school, and so that was really great for me to have that different kind of level discussion. And I always came away and said, I have learnt more this year than I this week than I've learned in the whole year at school, every year. And I always um made lots of new friends, and just at the end of last year, we had a reunion of some campers. So we're all still in touch, which is really nice, and some lifelong friends there.

James Hogson:

Oh, that's lovely to hear. And it's a shame to hear that a lot of these skills are not really practiced in schools and you hadn't had that experience. Do you have any examples for yourself or some of the friends that you've reconnected with, some of the skills which you felt were developed or ways of thinking and potentially what other families can expect?

Katy Pugh:

So for me, one of the main skills I learned was that I'm not always right when you're in child at school and you do quite well academically, you're really used to being always right. And to go and have someone challenge that, and you have to learn to look inwardly and think, why do I think that? I actually know why I think that. Okay, let's talk through and have a discussion. It was such a valuable skill. And to be able to critically think and then present my ideas compellingly to an audience that might be quite critical of you at a really young age actually turns out to be really useful in the workplace. That's basically what you do all the time in the workplace, and to be really confident about that and not be knocked back when someone disagrees with you and not take that personally, but open up actually to a really interesting, exciting debate is exciting. And in Camp Quest, there's nothing like humping someone up to the top of a totem pole, which felt like 50 metres off the ground. I'm sure it's probably only about five, but it felt very tall at the time. And you've drunk them up and you've had this really intense experience, and then you go out the top. I actually think your point was really important. I've thought about it a lot while growing up, and there's nothing like that to bring you together with people that you'd never normally talk to. So that was really great as a young child and the skills I've taken into being an adult.

James Hogson:

Yeah, I can imagine. And and Astra, as an organizer as well, are you earning in game some of the conversations that you're having with the kids at the camp?

Alastair Lichten:

Yeah, and I think it's a really different experience. And I think you may be able to tell some of your viewers. I'm a little bit older than Katie. Uh, but when the first camp that I volunteered at, I believe that was the first camp that Katie had transitioned from being a camper to being a volunteer. And so I've always I have I've been able to I've been able to learn a lot from her. And I always had questions for her about stuff while we were there. Katie is really engaged with our alumni community and hearing about the lasting impact of CampQuest on those young people has been really special. It was earlier last year on just my parenting blog, I just started an outreach and a survey asking people for their memories of CampQuest, and now because I was thinking, is it time to bring it back? And reading some of the feedback and experiences of people, some people who'd been 10 years ago almost now, with some really great experiences. And I also interviewed Sam, the one of the driving forces behind the launch of the initial CampQuest UK, about her experiences and how our time at camp have impacted our views on parenting. I know me as a volunteer, learning how to organise an activity for young children is a really great skill if they're going to become a parent. Learning how exhausting and testing and rewarding kids can be is a really valuable experience. And I'd also say CampQuest was probably for me the first place that I actually discovered looking back my identity as a neurodivergent person.

James Hogson:

Oh interesting. Yeah. So I it's all fascinating the range of activities and how you're getting really encouraging critical thinking throughout the camps. I think one thing that often comes up with humanists, particularly those who are parents, is the fact that we don't like to be prescriptive or dogmatic when talking to children. The whole idea is we're raising them to think for themselves. So I'm wondering how you at the camp, how you encourage values such as empathy, curiosity, and as mentioned, really focusing on critical thinking without telling children what to believe. Are there techniques that you found to be particularly helpful or exercises that really work for encouraging that freedom of thought? Alistair, perhaps I'll ask you first.

Alastair Lichten:

It was really just almost related to that, maybe a little bit of a tangent, but I just remember it was really interesting, Katie, talking about the newspaper coverage because I remember the early the first camp quest, the Believe the Daily Mail have a full-page, front page like panic story about atheist indoctrination launching. It's like, I mean, do you know how many religious summer camps there are? Like just the sort of panic, and every idea for community building that I've uh every time that someone has written a book about critical thinking for children, there's been people complaining, oh, this is just every atheist or humanist or secular community, oh, you're just this is like a church. Every attempt to educate and engage young people in conversations about critical thinking and non-religion is oh, this is just like indoctrination. For many years, I led on education campaigns at the National Secular Society, and this is while I was volunteering at Camp Quest, and I would often have these experiences where a parent would get in touch because there'd been some issue at their kid's school, either maybe an evangelical group having come in or could biased RE lesson, and now their kid had maybe picked up or was very interested in these religious ideas or scared about going to hell because of something someone had said to them. And so often I had these experiences where parents would say to me, Now, how can you help me? I'm an atheist, but I've never spoken, I've never told my children anything about religion because I want them to make up their own minds. But we don't help children make up their own minds by not talking to them about issues. It was raised in an environment where certainly among many middle class, working class white people, the idea is that you don't talk about race, and that's how we solve racism, we don't talk about race, and now we understand that educating children about diversity from a young age and giving them an age-appropriate understanding of these issues is really important. We all have, no matter what our beliefs are, we all have to inculcate values in our children, and there's a difference if those values are based on reason and empathy, if they're based on dogma, the difference between inculcation and indoctrination is indoctrination comes with emotional and intellectual manipulation. So, but that's gonna go just a slightly away from the point. But at CampQuest, we have our values, and there are so many other camps that people can go to, those values are not super prescriptive. In fact, there's an incredible amount of freedom has always been at Camp Quest for how young people want to engage in the activities and the conversations. When we're doing P for C, like for example, we do P for C, and then Katie may talk more about her experiences that as a young person, going through that experience. That has rules like you're not allowed to interrupt people, we have to take turns speaking, and we strictly enforce those rules because it gives them then the freedom to go off on tangents to explore different ideas, to have that real, genuine freedom of thought. That's it. We have a huge amount of freedom at CampQuest, but we have expectations of behaviour, you can't about how you treat people, and it's the same. And my approach to parenting has been informed by my experience at CampQuest that you set standards, you have rules, but those rules are the rules which allow you to have more freedom, they're not just arbitrary, they're not about my authority. There's never at Camp Quest this sort of, you've got to listen to me because I'm the person in charge. If it's a health and safety thing, it's like you need to listen to the person in charge of the health and safety. But uh, in terms of how you think, how you feel, that's for you to explore.

James Hogson:

And Katie, I'd love to get your thoughts on that as well. But perhaps you could explain the one of the exercises you mentioned there, Alistair, P for C was that what it was called? Katie, could you explain how that works? And then we'd love to get your thoughts on again how values and free thought is encouraged.

Katy Pugh:

Yeah, of course. So P for C is down to philosophy for children. So I believe it's something that's actually done in some schools in San Aires, I think in the north of England, from what I remember. But we had an amazing leader called Diana, and she introduced philosophy for children to Campcrest because she used to run it in schools. And the premise is you start with a stimulus. Sometimes it's a poem or a painting, but it could be anything. We've been discussing what might be a good stimulus for the camp, actually. And there's a series of standing stones nearby that might be an excellent stimulus. And so what you do is you start off and you discuss the stimulus in some detail, and then you start to ask questions that the stimulus might bring up based on that discussion. And what you do is then you categorize these questions. So you look at things like why might the painter have been influenced by the current contextual situation? That's an interesting question. There's some discussion, but more often than not, there are facts within that answer. There are hard facts, and you might form an opinion based on those facts, but there are facts involved in the answer. And what you're looking for is the kind of question underneath that really gets into. The nitty-gritty of looking into why you might morally think something, why you might hold an opinion that has no right answer. It's just your own personal moral judgment. And PFC is all about getting to that question. And then you have several questions that meet that criteria and you vote on which one you'd like to discuss. It's all the very democratic process. And then once you've decided which question you'd like to discuss, there's always an object. We had a little squeaky cake, but there's an object that you pass round. And when you're holding the object, you can talk. And when you're not, you can't. It's really basic, but it's really good. And normally the person in charge, the only thing you're doing is handing out the pig or the object relatively fairly. And when we had an alumni meetup, we actually did P for C again because loads of us hadn't done anything like it. And we all said, that's the most I've had to think in months. It really challenges your brain in a different way. It's such a simple setup, but it's really good to get to the base of the problem. And we often, a good question, an example of this is, you know, is the shift of Theseus, which is something probably most people were familiar with, still the same shift if you've replaced every board. That's kind of the level of question you're talking about because there's no right or wrong answer, and it really gets into the nitty-gritty. And for me, this is the first place I'd ever been asked, okay, but why do you think that? Not in a difficult way, not in a I think you're wrong, not in a disrespectful way, but a curious way, with I want to know why you think that, because I want to learn. And having that respectful debate where you can choose to disagree at the end of it, and that's okay, is something that I think is quite different that philosophy for children really enables and allows. And that's a really good way to develop critical thinking skills if someone asks you why, but it doesn't come with I think you're wrong. It's just I'd like to know more. I'd like you to be able to justify yourself. And suddenly what you thought was a deeply held belief when you start to been asked why, actually, I don't know why. And Camp Quest was a very safe space to be able to say, I got that wrong. I didn't know why. I'd love to know more about you. Have you thought through it a bit more? And these conversations weren't happening with the leaders, they were happening with my fellow campers. More often than not, the most interesting conversations that have really stayed with me happened with other 12, 13, 14-year-olds. Um, it wasn't with the leaders of the camp, nor they helped facilitate learning those skills. They weren't essential to being able to have those conversations.

Alastair Lichten:

I'd say, as of as an adult watching kids do P for C, it's really difficult to shut up. It's really difficult to resist the temptation to leap in and sort of, oh, actually, have you thought about it? Oh, actually, that's really difficult. And that's a skill that needs to be learned as well. And it's okay for children to go down the weather rabbit hole and be like saying some weird stuff. I'm not sure if I'm not swearing on the podcast. Well, it's okay for them to be wrong about stuff and to be exploring being wrong. And as an adult, you're gonna maybe need to step back and trust the process and trust the group to to do that. And maybe because we're doing this year a family camp rather than going away with the kids, it could be that parents who come along can pick up some of those P for C managing tactics for helping kids have these conversations at home as well.

James Hogson:

I could see that being a really interesting exercise, even for some of the adult group humanist groups that I'm involved with, I think, or even in company settings, any group of people, I think having that structured framework and that allowing people to really take their thoughts and then have them questioned openly without judgment, that's a rare skill. So I'm really keen to see how that that exercise plays out. So if any listeners are intrigued or keen to find out more, where can they contact you and uh just remind us of the dates of the next camp?

Alastair Lichten:

So if I go to campquests.uk and they will find and click on the family camp 2026, that's got the dates, that's got a booking form. We ask people to fit in a basic booking form and pay a deposit. If you are in the position that you read the description and you go, I think this is for me, but I'm not entirely sure, then definitely get in contact with us. We've got a contact, we've got a contact form. We ask for a deposit. We then need to follow up with a bit more of a detailed questionnaire uh covering things diet issue preference, uh, age of the kids, any accessibility, any accessibility issues. The camp is a first bank holiday weekend, so I think that's Saturday the second to Monday the 4th of May. Maybe we've got a Star Wars theme for that. I'm not sure. That's campquest.uk.

James Hogson:

Wonderful. Well, look, thank you both so much for the for your time. And before we go, we have our standard closing question. So I'm going to ask for a volunteer. Uh, since you're both volunteers, I'm gonna ask someone to volunteer to provide the answer today, which is what's something which you've changed your mind on and what inspired that change.

Katy Pugh:

Yeah, of course. I've done a bit of thinking about this because it's actually quite hard to think about what you might have fundamentally changed your stance on. But recently I've been traveling and before going, you hear lots of people say, I've done Peru. I've done Thailand, I've done a whole country. And then when you're there and you're in somewhere for quite a while, you can't possibly do England, can you? You can't do England. That phrase sounds completely ridiculous. So why is it okay to say it when you're traveling to another country? And it's something I never really considered until it was pointed out to me. And then as soon as you start to hear people say it, oh, it's a bit cringe, it's a bit, you haven't done Thailand, you were there for five weeks. It's and it implies that your experience is the most, the most important experience. What you did was all that needs to be done in that country. Yeah, of course you went to the beach, of course you went zip-liding or whatever you did, that's fine, but you haven't completed a country. And I think that's a really interesting take on tourism, which is a complex, difficult topic, but it's I would say something that is really good at helping you change your mind. And for me, as soon as I realized this, I was like, oh, yeah, I was wrong. I was so wrong. I I need to completely change my language on this. That is not an okay way to talk about traveling, talk about being a tourist, talk about visiting another country. And I think some people find that really hard to take a step back and immediately say, I was wrong, and be able to take that on board and change it. And I'm really glad I'm able to do that. And when presented with evidence, I'm able to reflect quickly on how I feel and change my mind.

James Hogson:

Thank you. That's a prime example of self-reflection and critical thinking in action.

Alastair Lichten:

Katie used to be a very committed flat earther, so even so maybe the traveling has changed her mind on that as well.

Katy Pugh:

I saw the curvature. You know, we can confirm.

James Hogson:

On that bombshell, Alistair Lichchton, Katie Pugh, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now and the very best of luck with CampQuest. Thanks very much. I hope we see some of your listeners there.

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