Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and the Scouting Idea

. Robert Baden-Powell introduced the idea of Scouting as an after-school activity for school boys in England, following the Boer War. Baden-Powel had seen action in the wilder parts of the British Empire, and was fired with the idea that the basics of field survival, and the idea of adventure in the outdoors could have something to offer boys, an alternative to exclusively indoor activities. My knowledge of the Boy Scouts comes from dabbling in the Scout Troop and the Cub Scouts Troop at my boy's school. The Scouting Culture had an interesting variety of aspects to it, and I shall try to describe them as objectively as I can, leaving you to draw your own conclusions. Boy Scout Skills Boy Scouts were taught a variety of highly useful skills. Starting with simple first aid, camping skills, cooking, woodcraft --being able to read the signs left by people in the woods, both unintentional (which way did they go, here?) and intentional (here's an indication for us to go right!), basic sewing, making simple camp furniture using only wood and rope, map reading, etc. The emphasis was in being able to function out in the field or in woods, in contrast to the tendency for urban youth to be dysfunctional outside the city, or even outside the home. Boy Scout Attitudes Scout attitudes were distillation of Christian attitudes, and generally accepted British ideals, starting with service, respect, patriotism and integrity, and brotherhood towards other scouts, most especially scouts of the worldwide organization. These high ideals were encapsulated in the Scout Law, and the Scout Promise, which took the form of what amounted to a promise to God. This contained the seeds of trouble, when the time would come when one could not assume that all decent men would be god-fearing. The original Scout promise, with "religion" replacing "God", and "Queen" replacing the original "King", and then "My Country" replacing "The Queen" : ***On my honor, I promise to do my best, ***to do my duty to my religion, and my country; ***to help other people at all times, ***and to obey the Scout Law. Boy Scout Organization The movement spread all over the commonwealth, and of course into the United States, where presently their histories diverged. The different difficulties of the American branch of the Scouts and the British branch are a study in the different paths they chose to follow. The Commonwealth Scout movement gloried in its diversity; indeed my strongest memories of Scouting are of multitudes of scouts singing their unique scouting songs very, very badly, but very enthusiastically indeed. Scouts collected songs from all over; from New Zealand to China to India to Africa, sung in the native languages and horribly mispronounced until the words were quite unrecognizable. I have personally seen Canadian scouts wince as an entire Jamboree sang Alouette in Scouting French, which is a sound no one should be forced to hear. Similarly, there are songs descended from ditties learned by Baden Powell himself from the musical tribes of South Africa, subsequently mangled by all the nationalities of the world. So the organization gloried in its diversity, and its ability to bring scouts of different nationalities and ethnicities together, united in their common Scouting culture, and of course, the bad singing). One staple is "ging gang guli guli guli guli watcha", or "ging gang guli guli guli guli wash-wash", the latter for the more hygienic-minded scouts. So the Scouts had very valuable skills to offer, an amazing organization, wonderful ideals, and dedicated leaders with a lot of knowledge and experience. Unfortunately, the movement seemed to attract very earnest individuals, with a very limited sense of humor, and moreover it is these persons who tended to rise to levels of responsibility and power within the movement. There was no lack of perfectly normal, intelligent, well-balanced members in the movement; it was just that they did not have the time, or the inclination to take the reins of the movement. Since the mid-twentieth century, the various philosophical and social developments that have made their mark on Western Culture such as the equality of races, and the equality of Women, and the notion that separate is not equal, threw the Scouting culture into disarray. Locked into the rigid code of the Scout Law and the Scout Promise, a sort of Scouting catechism, it was not clear to the leadership how these things --which, to Scouts, have almost religious significance-- can be liberalized into a new environment where girls were eager to join traditionally male only activities, where sexual preferences considered deviant in Victorian times were being considered relatively non-alarming, where strict segregation of the sexes was not common anywhere, and where subscription to a religion was not considered an essential demand on decent people. The culture of Scouting, in some of its aspects, in its glorification of diversity, was perfect for this new era. But the ritual aspects of it, the Law and the Promise, were not flexible enough. And, tragically, the leadership of the Scout movement have not been able to find a sufficiently elastic successor to the old Baden-Powell promise, which defiantly mentioned God, Queen and Country. Scouting, by the middle of the twentieth century, was no longer an organization with military connections. It had taken a path most definitely away from militarism, towards non-military activity that was still vigorous and adventurous. But the rigidity protected by the Law and the Promise had military aspects to it, which it was now necessary to moderate. Over the first few years of this century, the British Scouting Association, which had dropped the name Boy Scouts in favor of simply Scouts, adopted flexible promises, which could be made to God, or Allah, or even not made to a deity at all; there was provision around promising loyalty to the Country (since some members were guests from other lands), and the strictly masculine culture was moderated to accommodate girls. (The companion organization of Girl Guides in Britain did not reciprocally move to admit boys, which does make a weird kind of sense in the imperfect world in which we live, where sometimes women do need to have time away from their brothers!) To some die-hard old-timers, admitting girls has destroyed the delightfully testosteronic atmosphere they may have perceived as being essential to the Scouting ethos, and the new promises seem worse than no promises at all. But to my mind, Scouting still has a lot to offer. Even if badges are now given for computer skills and other such indoor things as for the old time knots and whipping (nothing dangerous: just a way of finishing off ends of ropes), it is possible to enjoy the aspect of Scouting that has to do with outdoorsmanship in spite of the fact that its appeal might not be universal within the society of Scouts. Can a group maintain its coherence even if everyone in it doesn't do the same stuff? As long as the singing is bad, I think they can hang together. Arch