Why Scouting?

Observe a community or classroom anywhere in the world and you will conclude that boys instinctively form groups, adopt uniforms, establish standards, develop a credo and create initiatory challenges. While most educational systems battle these instincts scouting gives them a means of positive expression. Boys yearn to belong, to gain acceptance and approval outside the confines of their family. Their imperfect search for guidance and understanding is often met with suspicion and misapprehension. In adolescence they try on lots of attitudes and poses paradoxically seeking approval from the adult world in their very rebellion against it. It can be a tough time for everybody.

We all more or less hammered our way through adolescence in whatever way we could. Some had it easier than others. There were some people who made the process more difficult for us and some who helped. That's part of the reason that I am a Scoutmaster - I'd like to help. I like to go camping, I like to teach, and I like to cook over a fire.

Scouting, for all the protestations otherwise, is not an ideology. It is a movement with a program that recognizes how to channel the unstable energies and excesses of adolescence. When scouting doesn't work as it should it is usually adults who have made a real mess of things; it is almost never the fault of boys.

I am a liberal card carrying member of the ACLU, a Buddhist and a stone cold Democrat. Most people would say that Scouting is not a likely fit for me, but I have been at this for just over 20 years now and it fits fine.

At its best the program is inclusive, resilient and able to bring people together. After beginning in Great Britain in 1907 the movement spread around the world. In the United States we have the Boy Scouts of America, a once revered and respected organization that now has a reputation for excluding some people from membership based on a bizarrely narrow and relatively new interpretation of the Scout Oath and Law.

This perplexing situation has led me to reconsider my involvement with such an organization. I concluded that I would no more leave scouting over the current administration of the BSA than I would renounce my U.S. citizenship because I disagree with the current administration of the government.

One stays at it, acts as an agent for peaceful change and has confidence that better times are coming.

Comments

[A. Nonny Mouse]

Thanks for your comments about scouting -- I'm an Eagle Scout who through a strange series of circumstances has ended up as a Scoutmaster 15 years later and having a hard time deciding if I think scouting is still relevant for today's boys. Since getting my Eagle, I've moved on in life and feel like a lot of the Scouter's I've dealt with aren't the most "with-it" folks, so your post is a great bolster since you've thought out this issue so well.

[Sean R.]

Great blog...your concluding line, "One stays at it, acts as an agent for peaceful change and has confidence that better times are coming." is very inspiring. I am an asst. den leader for my son's Webelos den and I think scouting is a great agent for change if used properly.

-Sean