Friday Five - Advancement

Every Friday five posts from Scoutmaster worth reviewing. This week the subject is Advancement;

Holding Scouts Hostage - the 13 year-old Eagle?
" Now I'll go further... To artificially and arbitrarily hold a Scout back from his own advancement goals is a form of hostage-taking.  In doing this, in purposefully delaying a Scout by throwing up roadblocks, so that he "stays in the troop longer" is a complete and total miscarriage of the Scouting program itself, to say nothing of the advancement plan."

Kill Your Troop Advancement Plan
My contention is that if a system for compelling scouts to advance they will wait until they are prompted. If advancing depends on their own initiative they will motivate themselves.

Standardization of Advancement
We want to get them ALL along through cheery self development from within and not through the imposition of formal instruction from without.

Tough Calls - Advancement
What I came to realize was that these requirements are purposefully silent when it comes to numbers or uniformity of evaluation. We cannot assess these requirements by comparing one Scout to another. The only way to assess that a Scout has successfully completed these requirements is the Scout himself. Has he met his own expectations? Have we done our job of helping him internalize a personal standard of responsibility?

Boards of Review
He has had his requirements signed off, he has had a Scoutmaster's conference and in uniform and armed with his handbook he's off to a Board of Review.