Follow
Scoutmasters need to understand what makes Scouting different from everything else – why young men and women have been Scouts all over the world for the past century. If they take the time to do this they’ll avoid most Eagle Scout problems.
Scouting’s founder Baden-Powell envisioned a movement that would give everyone the opportunity to challenge and achievement based not on a single standard of performance but on a highly individualized, internalized standard. (Read Baden-Powell’s thoughts on this here).
If we can encourage Scouts to define, internalize and follow an internal standard of acheivement we will have given them an set of skills that will immeasurably enrich their lives and communities.
Like many Scoutmasters I was initially frustrated by the lack of measurable metrics in Scouting. Just what is Scout Spirit? What percentage of meetings or camp outs must a Scout attend to be considered active? How does one measure the effectiveness of someone’s leadership?
Metrics are missing for a good reason; every Scout and every Scout’s circumstances in life are different. Scouts who are academically talented and Scouts who are poor students, from affluent families, from poor families all become Eagle Scouts. There are no class-a or class-b Eagle Scouts.
So one particularly common source of Eagle Scout drama is eliminated when Scoutmasters understand and embrace the concept of individual effort evaluated by an individualized standard. Can’t you use this individualized standard to justify bad behavior, poor performance and indifference? How does a Scoutmaster hold Scouts accountable if everyone is going to advance anyway?
The answer is actually very simple, it should be part of every Scoutmaster conference and I’ll write about it in my next post.
Yes, Sebastian, I do have a problem with those kinds of my projects. My notion of a ‘true’ Eagle project is one that stretches the boy to take on something bigger than he’s ever done before, to plan extensively, deal with adults in a professional setting, organize a team (of kids and adults) to execute the project, and then provide a detailed report afterwards that honestly appraises the successes and failures of the project. For a Scout with diminished abilities, this may be a day-long park clean-up (as it was for one such boy in our troop); for one of my future Ivy League Scouts, I expect the project to be commensurate with their abilities — those Chisholm Trail projects in the new Scouting Magazine, the clean-up (with prior training on dealing with toxics) of a mile of river in downtown San Jose, the creation (with brochure and medal)of a new BSA historic trail, organizing and rehearsing a string quartet to tour local convalescent homes, etc. Even when we are running out of time and a Scout decides on a ‘predictable’ project, I find that both I and troop committee expect the Scout to take it one step further than what simply needs to be done. For example, to use some recent projects: it was not enough to simply build a privacy wall for the girl’s bathroom at a local school — we wanted it painted and landscaped, with some flowing vines planted that would eventually cover the wall. By the same token, a storage shed for after-school backpacks had to be painted, given a sturdy roof, filled with different hooks for different purposes, etc. I also expect, when I visit one of these projects as they are happening, to see not only Scouts, but adults, and even friends and classmates helping out. My concern with the project you describe — a ‘predictable’ project at a troop campout – is that none of this ‘stretching’ is taking place: the troop organized the campout, so there is no real leadership challenge and the manpower is already provided; and the project itself requires no original thinking on the part of the Scout. By Scouting rules, I suppose this is a legit Eagle project, but I’m not sure what the Scout really gets out of it. To my mind an Eagle project, big or small, should make the boy a better person . . .and a great Eagle project, if they dare to try one, should change them (and the world) forever.
Do you find that there is an issue with “predictable” projects not presenting enough of a leadership experience?
How do you make sure that the scout gets the experience out of it that the rank recognizes. I’m thinking, a bit of a recent project where the workers were troop members and the work was done during a troop campout.
Rob:
The Eagle Project issue is something I’ve wrestled with for a long time. In our troop, we’ve vacillated over the years between long runs of the predictable, and pedestrian, painted park benches and schoolyard clean-ups — and the occasional Eagle project Arms Race, where one superb project by a Scout provokes his peers to attempt to do something even better. The latter are great fun, exhausting, and get all of the attention, but the former is the bread-and-butter of Eagle projects.
In my experience, there is almost no correlation between the quality of a Scout and the quality of his Eagle project. The two finest Scouts I’ve known both had lame Eagle Projects By comparison, my oldest son, who was a mediocre Scout (by coincidence, he and I are the cover of this month’s Scouting magazine), did probably one of the greatest Eagle projects of the last twenty years. It got international coverage, almost killed him, cost him his palms (he didn’t care) and he stopped counting hours at 2,000. It made him briefly famous, but it still didn’t make him a great Scout.
What I try to do, when a Scout announces that he is ready to go for his Eagle, is to sit down with him and have a brainstorming session. What are his interests? What are his project ambitions? I try to help guide him to some project ideas that are congruent with his personality — the athletic kid who wants to teach soccer skills to underpriviledged kids, the outdoorsman who’d like to restore a trail, the intellectual who wants to design an exhibit for a local museum — and occasionally, the big dreamer, like Tad, who wants to leave a mark on the world (for these last I always warn them that they can’t give up when it starts getting hard). Because these projects are a better fit to the boy, the Scouts often have a greater enthusiasm for it — and richer memories of it — than they would with a cookie cutter project.
Meanwhile, I always try to have a half-dozen of those predictable project ideas (like those from your Parks guy) in my back pocket — mostly for the Scouts who either have no imagination. . .or have run out of time.
Your description of the psychology of the “superscouter” makes a lot of sense, albeit this one is actually an EAGLE (caps intended to emphasize the irony). It reminds me a bit of my dissertation adviser who kept reminding us of how hard he had worked as a graduate student, except the hours/week was more than 7×24, by the time I graduated.
On a digression, we seem to have a very repetitive set of Eagle projects. Typically – find a trail or park – clean it up – done. I’m being a little simplistic here. But in aggregate, they are almost identical. Some of this is due to the fact that we have the head groundskeeper for a local university (Emory – which owns many of the parks and trails) on the committee so it’s relatively easy to find projects like that, but some just reflects a lack of imagination.
There’s nothing wrong with this, except we have (like most troops) a pool of talented scouts with other expertise. This ranges from the new webmaster (your prototypical computer nerd – but an excellent ultralight backpacker) to scouts who can take apart and more importantly reassemble so it works – their cars. My eagle project, for example, built on my interest as a naturalist, and involved setting up a nature trail. I’d like to see our scouts be able to have similar opportunities. (I hope this isn’t sounding too much like another “superscouter”).
I’d like to bring a list of other example projects to the Eagle coordinator to see if I can spark some imagination. Do you have any ideas of where I can find a reliable source?
In my experience, those hardcore Scoutmasters and ASMs (Super Scouters, we call them) are inevitably former Scouts who quit at 1st class or Life. . .and ever since have had an unreasonable and idealized image of what an Eagle Scout should be. For them, no Scout ever lives up to this ideal, and so every new Eagle with whom they work is a painful compromise in some way. By comparison, Eagle SMs and ASMs, knowing what they themselves went through, usually have a more realistic perspective.
I happen to be an Eagle, and as the ASM for older scouts in my troop, I’ve worked with about 20 Scouts as they earned their Eagle (with a dozen more who will likely earn the rank in the next couple years). I’ve long believed that Scouting is really about four things: 1) Scouting and camping skills (the lower ranks); 2) An unequalled chance to survey future careers and hobbies (the merit badges); 3) Learning to be an enlightened leader who brings out the best in subordinates (PL and SPL); and 4)Taking on a project of your own vision that is bigger than anything you’ve ever attempted, and then bringing all of your skills to bear to accomplishing it (the Eagle project).
Super Scouters inevitably focus on the first — while, beyond some vital skills such as first aid and what do when lost, in the long term it is the other three that really count. Baden Powell himself all-but admitted that the outdoors stuff was bait to get kids to enter a program that would make them into better adults. Every troop needs a Super Scouter or two, but they need to be tempered and used for the gifts they have (especially in maintaining a high quality program). They should never be put in an executive role — because then they are toxic to the overall experience of being a Scout.
My Eagle SMCs (rare, because I usually serve as mentor to the candidates) are more like conversations between two adults, not a test of how well they can do a shear lashing. There’s a little of that — especially on those life skills like first aid — but most of it is a discussion about what Scouting has meant to them and how much they have been changed by the experience, the meaning of Eagle Scout, the lesson of the successes and failures in their project, a reminder of who has helped them along the way and their duty to pay it back to future Scouts, and their plans for the future. Most Eagle Scouts are high school juniors and seniors and their minds are already casting towards college and adulthood — and I think the last important thing we can do for them is to help them through that doorway — not punish them because, in their nervousness, they confuse the Scout Slogan with the Scout Motto.
Having just dealt with one of these “gatekeepers” who didn’t even bother to read the current requirements for two merit badges that “couldn’t be done at summer camp” (they could), I don’t have a lot of time for these drama kings anymore.
I think the BSA has started, and moves in fits and starts, in the right direction, but it does have a few fossils. My favorite good example is personal fitness, where when I was a scout required that you met a pretty tough standard. (well tough for an uncoordinated non-athelete who just did philmont at 51 years and 106 miles in northern tier at 52 😉 ). Today the requirement is to improve and hit a target that you set. I was just counselor for several scouts and saw the whole range from really athletic (5′ 21s mile run, 60 situps, 30 pushups, …) to not (going from walk/run the mile in more than 9 minutes to actually running the mile in about 7). It can even be adapted so that scouts with heart problems can still get the badge without playing games on the requirements.
No adding to or taking away from requirements is, to my mind at least, perfectly in line with BP’s injunction to consider individual effort.
The challenge and the measurement can’t be altered (I’d guess that far less than 1/4 of requirements for Ranks or Merit Badges are written with a numerical metric) but effort if the Scout is always considered.
For example I have a Scout with Downs Syndrome – his lap in the pool os not as elegant as a Scout who is on the swim team but it is a lap. Both have made their best effort with markedly different results.
Nice set of reflections; can’t wait for the third. I went back and read B.-P.’s comment you referenced. One item which stuck out was the phrase “the AMOUNT OF EFFORT EXERCISED BY THE INDIVIDUAL CANDIDATE”. This seems to be more like the “Do your best” theme of Cub Scouts than current BSA policy and it makes me wonder whether we have already drifted from B.-P.’s approach. I keep thinking of the phrase that we neither add to nor take away from Merit Badge requirements, which does not strike me as the spirit of what B.-P. was aiming for in the quoted text.