There have long been discussions among serious stamp collectors over how to best grow our hobby, and the discussion has usually tended to be dominated by those who favor outreach. They believe that a love of the hobby is learned, and by exposing school students and relatives to the pleasures of stamp collecting we plant the seeds of the next generation of avid collectors. This approach is certainly intuitive. How can anyone catch philatelic fever if they haven’t been exposed to the virus? But the outreach approach has been tried on a broad basis twice in philatelic history, and the results have been mixed at best.
In the 1930s Captain Tim sent out millions of stamp albums to kids and had a weekly radio show. Certainly many child collectors entered the hobby, but how many of them grew into serious adult philatelists is questionable. Most think that more serious collectors were made by the scurrilous Farley issues of 1936, where deliberate errors were offered to political friends, and, after an outcry, issued to the public, than were ever made by Captain Tim. This was because adults with philatelic inclination seem to respond to financial stimuli more than any other. Farley prices rose fast, and many newer collectors were attracted and stayed on board. The other great era of philatelic outreach was the 1970s and 1980s USPS school stamp collecting outreach program. Millions of kids were exposed to philately, and the results thirty years later have not shown that this outreach had any serious impact on the number of collectors.
Interest in philately seems to require a precondition