Scoutmaster Podcast 102

And now to you, Scoutmasters.

So last spring, we were on our fishing trip. Now, we don't go every year, but every couple of years or so, the guys plan a trip where they can go fishing. And so we have this great campsite, and it's near a brook and everything like that. And I watch a couple of the older guys get up in the morning, and they get out of the campsite pretty early, and they scatter on down the trail, and they're looking behind them, kind of making sure nobody's following or anything like that. So, you know, we get up, and after a while, I work my way down the trail, looking in on the Scouts, see how they're doing. And I come across these two older Scouts, and they've got their spot on the brook there. And, you know, I saunter down to them. I say, how's the fishing, guys? I say, oh, it's great. We love this spot. This was the spot we were in a couple of years ago. I said, how do you know? And they said, well, there's this little bed of clover right here that grows right next to the brook, and we know that this is our spot. And I said, guys, you can't use that to tell if this is your spot. And they say, well, why is that? And I said, come on, everybody knows you can't tell a brook by its clover. Oh, my. Do they get any better? They just keep getting worse, don't they? Hey, this is podcast 102.

Hey, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clark Green. Oh, man, I'll tell you, do you know any better jokes that aren't just horrible puns? And it may be they gotta have a connection. They have to have a Scout connection. That's one of the rules there, okay? However tenuous that connection may be, they need to have a Scout connection. Send them to me, would you? And skip the ones with penguins and canoes in the desert and stuff like that. We try. We try. Yeah. Let's look in the mailbag here and see who's been in touch this past week. We have this message from Ray Britton, and Ray is a Scoutmaster for Troop 42 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And he says, congratulations on reaching the 100 podcast milestone. I've been an avid listener since discovering the podcast, and I tell everybody about it. Yes, I am a Clark disciple, too. Oh, man, we better watch out. I'm glad you're getting something out of it, Ray. He says, what makes this so valuable is the quality of the information. Week after week, there's great information for Scouters. Best of all is your constant reminder to look at what is written to determine what is actually required. I've managed to turn back a number of requirements or policies when the documentation to support that requirement or policy could not be produced. Of course, I've also used that on Scout who tried to read the first sentence of a requirement and not the entire requirement. Hey, we'll talk about that in a second. He also says an excellent example of the service you provide was the recent interview about the new Eagle Scout project workbook and the new guide to advancement. Mass Concern met the announcement of the new workbook in our council. Clarification from some of the key people responsible for the workbook and the guide is something I would have thought the BSA would have been promoting. It took you to go straight to the source and get the information. Thank you. Keep up the excellent work. Well, thank you, Ray. You know, reading stuff. Reading stuff. Hey, I guess anybody who manufactures a piece of electronic equipment or any kind of product would have to tell you that people just don't read stuff. Sometimes they don't read the manual. Well, you know, the Scout Handbook, the Scoutmaster's Handbook, and all the information released by the bsa, we got to read it and then we just do what's in it and hey, we're golden, right? So that is my constant reminder. It's all written down somewhere and let's find it, let's read it, and then let's do it. That's the way that it works, folks. This time around in Scoutmastership, in seven minutes or less, we're going to be talking about the essential element of Scouting, how it got developed, what it is and what we got to do with it. The essential element of Scouting. And if it's an essential element, that means that it's not Scouting without it. Yeah. And ScoutMaster chip in seven minutes or less is a bit more than seven minutes, about three times as much. I'm sorry, I try. But hey, let's. Let's move right into that here. But you know what? I do want to tell you this. 2012 is the centenary year of the Eagle Scout Award. And the Eagle Scout Award has been part of American culture for 100 years. This year. How about that? And one of the things we're going to do on the podcast is we're going to celebrate that centenary by doing a series of interviews with notable Eagle Scouts. These are people who, in their adult life, have reached the pinnacle of achievement in their particular field of endeavor. And I want to talk to them and to ask them how becoming an Eagle Scout, how their Scouting experience has carried on into their adult life and helped them be a success. And hopefully that'll be an inspiration to us as Scout leaders and something that we can also play for some of our Scouts, encourage them towards sticking with it and becoming Eagle Scouts. But right now, we got other business to take care of. So let's get started, shall we? Scoutmastership in seven minutes or

In the late 1800s in America, a fellow rose to prominence as an author and an illustrator. And his name was Ernest Thompson Seton. And Ernest was this kind of woolly bearded mystic, and he wrote and illustrated books about the outdoors and about animals specifically. One of his best known works at the time was Wild Animals I have Known. And he kind of anthropomorphized animals a little bit. And then he had another book called Two Little Savages. And it was about two boys who kind of took up the way of the woods and the Woodsman and used a lot of Native American lore and knowledge and kind of learned how to be boys in the out of doors. And it was exciting and compelling stuff. Seton wrote an illustrator for magazines regularly, and magazines, well, that was the television of the time. That was the Internet of the time. That was how ideas got out there into the world. Seton was a nationally famous author. He began working on this concept that he could take some of the things that he had been writing about and put them out into the world and actually start affecting people and young men specifically with these ideas of Woodcraft. And so he originated this group he called the Woodcraft Indians. He wrote something called the Birch Bark Roll. And the Birch Bark Roll was basically how to go about organizing a group of Woodcraft Indians in your town. And this started to catch on, and he had articles in this magazine about it. And it just became this very interesting kind of nascent movement in the early 1900s. If you go over to Great Britain at the time, there's a national hero there, a military hero who had prosecuted something called the Siege of Mafeking. And Mafeking was a town in the Boer War that was blockaded by the Boers and managed to survive. And the officer that was in charge of Mafeking during that siege became a national hero to the Britons. And his name was Sir Robert Baden Powell. Baden Powell also became a popular author. He was kind of fascinated with the ideas that he had used to organize groups in Mafeking. And it was groups of young men in Mafeking to help support the residents during the siege. He read some of Seton's material and in it he saw this kind of ingenious idea that he could use to address his concerns about British youth at the time. I think one of the constants in society is a concern about the state of our young people. I mean, your grandfather was concerned about your dad, your father's generation and father was concerned about you. And we are concerned about our own kids. Are they prepared to go out into the world? Do they have the strength morally and physically to be able to meet the challenges of life? This is a constant in human society. I think anywhere in the world you go at any time of history, that's always been a constant. Seton saw these kind of ideas from Native American history and Native American culture that he thought were timeless and honest and could help support America's youth. And Baden Powell had seen this war during the siege of Mafeking. Baden Powell was a military man, and a lot of his military thinking and a lot of the military terms came into use as he developed this idea of scouting based in a lot of ways, and he said at the time, based in a lot of ways on Seton's work. And perhaps the greatest thing that Baden Powell developed in his idea of this Scouting movement was the idea of a patrol. Now I'm saying that he developed wasn't that he invented this idea, it's something that he gave a name to because he realized that one of the other cultural constants in human society was that young men formed these kind of ad hoc groups. He called them gangs. The term gangs has a very uneasy connotation for us today. But at the time, this gang or this group, this kind of informal group, this sandlot baseball team that young men kind of naturally formed, was something that he took notice of. And he said, you know, if we take this existing propensity for young men to form these kinds of groups, and then we use this to inculcate a system of moral values and structures. If we kind of direct this at the high road and we give young men this self governing ability in these small groups with the idea that this will develop them as citizens and as decent human beings, Baden Powell thought that this could really catch on. And here we are about 105 years later, and the ideas that Seton had and that Baden Powell had kind of coalesced into this Scouting movement that we enjoy here 105 years later. Now, I think it's very useful for us as facilitators of Scouting, as scoutmasters and assistant scoutmasters and troop committee People, I think it's very important for us to understand the underpinnings of these things that we do on a weekly basis. And specifically, it's that great innovation, that great recognition of something that. That existed already that Baden Powell took and called patrols that he considered to be the heart of the Scouting movement. If you go and you look at a piece of work that Baden Powell wrote in the 1920s, I believe it was called Aids to Scoutmastership, he gives you a very succinct explanation of his conception of patrols, what they do, and their place in Scouting. We need to place the same value and emphasis on the patrol that he did in order for us to be successful as Scout leaders today. He said the patrol system is the one essential feature in which Scout training differs from that of all other organizations. The one essential feature, and where this patrol system is properly applied, it is absolutely bound to bring success. It can't help itself. The formation of the boys into patrols from six to eight and training them as separate units under its own responsible leader is the key to a good troop. The patrol is the unit of Scouting, always whether for work or for play or for discipline or for duty. So here he outlines the elemental concept behind the entire Scouting movement. The one essential thing that makes it work. An invaluable step in character training, he went on to say, is to put responsibility on the individual. This is immediately gained in a patrol leader being responsible for his patrol. It is up to him to take hold of and to develop the qualities of each Scout in his patrol. It sounds like a big order, but in practice, it works. Then, through emulation and competition between patrols, it produces a patrol spirit which is eminently satisfactory since it raises the tone among the boys and develops a higher standard of efficiency all around. Each Scout in the patrol realizes that he is, in himself a responsible unit and that the honor of his group depends in some degree on his own ability in playing the game. And this, like I said, is not something that Baden Powell invented. This is something that he recognized was already existing and he made the most of. So, to my lights, whenever we evaluate the work that we're doing, the effectiveness of Scouting and how that program, how this movement is impacting the life of an individual boy, is to look at the effectiveness of the way we are administering and applying this concept of patrols. The one essential element. The one essential element. In other words, if you don't have this effective, lively patrol system, you really don't have Scouting. And, you know, that might be a little bit of hyperbole on My part, but I think it's pretty close. I think it's got to be pretty close to being true. In AIDS to Scoutmastership, Baden Powell goes on to talk about the Patrol Leaders Council. He says the Patrol Leaders Council is an important part of the patrol system. It is a standing committee which under the guidance of the Scoutmaster, settles all the affairs of the troop, both administrative and disciplinary. It develops in its members self respect, ideals of freedom, coupled with a sense of responsibility and respect for authority, while it gives practice and procedure such as invaluable to the boys individually and collectively as future citizens. I mean, and think about this, a self governing group of boys. They have some things to go by, but they get to govern themselves. They get to make their own decisions. And this is. Do you remember being this age? If you go back and you think about this age, if you think about yourself at this age, one of the things you really were looking for was some freedom. You wanted the definition and the support of your family. You wanted the definition and support of society, but you also wanted to be free. You also wanted to have some self determination. And this is, you know, it's a natural part of developing as a person. And so you start testing boundaries and you start seeing just how far you can get with things. And if people really mean what they say and all those things that happen during adolescence, well, being a part of Scouting and being a part of a patrol that has real freehanded responsibility, that is going to be an important thing to the development of your personality and the way that you're going to begin to interact with the rest of the world. Back to AIDS of Scoutmastership and Baden Powell talks about the values of the patrol system. It's important that the Scoutmaster recognize the extraordinary value which he can get out of the patrol system. It is the best guarantee for permanent vitality and success for the troop. It takes a great deal of minor routine work off the shoulders of the Scoutmaster. But first and foremost, the patrol is the character school for the individual. To the patrol leader it gives practice and responsibility and in the qualities of leadership. To the Scout it gives subordination of self to the interests of the whole. The elements of self denial and self control involved in the team spirit of cooperation and good comradeship. But to get first class results from this system, you have to give the boyleaders real free handed responsibility. If you only give partial responsibility, you only get partial results. The main object is not so much in saving the Scoutmaster trouble as to give responsibility to the boy. Since this is the very best of all means for developing character. The Scoutmaster who hopes for success must not only study what is written about the patrol system and its methods, but must put into practice the suggestions that he reads. It is the doing of things that is so important. It is the doing of things that is so important. And only by constant trial can experience be gained by the patrol leader and his Scouts. The more he gives them to do, the more they will respond, the more strength and character they will achieve. So this central innovation, this most important part of Scouting, is one thing for us to really focus on and to concentrate on as leaders. And as I've said many, many times, this is not a program so much as a process. This is not a way of efficiently managing a group of boys. This is a process that they go through, this patrol system. And it's something that our founder reminds us, hey, we have to study it, we have to understand it, we have to constantly work with it, and that it is never arriving. It's a constant journey. So that's the great innovation. That is the one essential feature in which Scouting differs from everything else, and here's why. A lot of times we're missing the boat on the patrol system because it's so simple. A lot of times we're missing the boat on the implementing and applying the patrol method, the patrol system, to Scouting because it is really just that simple. We'd like it to be a little more complex. It does have a lot of complexity, but it's complex in the same way that driving a golf ball or hammering a nail or going up to bat in baseball is complex. I mean, anybody can take a bat, a hammer, a driver in their hand, and hit a nail or a baseball or a golf ball. Right? Anybody can pretty much manage that. But how many books have been written and movies have been shot? And how much advice has there been about how to get a perfect drive or how to hit a baseball out of the stadium or how to drive a nail properly? I mean, these things are deceptively easy to look at. They're easy for somebody to try, but getting really good at it, I mean, that's what takes a lot of concentration, a lot of thought, and a lot of analysis. And that's what we're constantly up to here. That's what we're constantly up to, is analyzing this, thinking about it, looking at it, and in all its wonderful kind of paradoxical simplicity and complexity, Baden Powell explained this whole thing in much less than a thousand words, and he really kind of gets right at the heart of it. And he says, this is where you need to be concentrating all your efforts. This is the single thing that you need to be thinking about and working on, because it is the way that everything else works. It's. It is the engine that drives the rest of the program. We have to be careful not to overlay it with a whole lot of administrative gobbledygook and management science and the way that the adult world looks at and manages things. And we need to start looking at it from a boy perspective. And we need to look at it from what they're getting out of going through the process of being in a patrol, of administering a patrol, and then those patrol leaders getting together and sitting around a table and administering their troop. I mean, it's a process of chaos and mess and learning and taking one step forward and two steps back. And it's always happening. It's always going, it's always churning because it always has new faces involved with it. If you're a Scout leader of some tenure, you know what I'm talking about. Because these things are cyclical. These, you know, patrol leaders become patrol leaders, and they kind of muddle around for a little bit, and they get going and then they get skilled at things, and then they move on, and then there's a new guy there. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to watch happen. You don't necessarily end up with that crisp military unit that somehow, somehow is really down at the core of a lot of our thinking. You don't end up with that wonderful, crisp, managerial, kind of efficient business style of things. It's a little more messy around the edges than that, because we have the incredible gift as Scout leaders of watching people do this for the very first time in their lives and begin to form these parts of their personality. It's a real privilege to be able to do that. So those are my words of encouragement that hopefully echo what has made Scouting what it is for the past 105 years. Get that patrol system moving, study it, think about it, do what you can, observe, watch, and remember always. It's not something that we're supposed to control. It's something that we're supposed to foment and implement and put out there within our group of Scouts. And we're going to let them control it, and we're going to watch from the sidelines as they do. We're going to offer what we can. We're going to keep them safe and happy, but we're going to watch something like this happen. That's the heart of the movement. That's what really works for us, and that's what really works for our Scouts.

Hey. Well, I want to thank you for listening to this edition of the Scoutmaster Podcast. Here's how you can keep in touch. First of all, you can read the Scoutmaster blog@scoutmastercg.com you can subscribe to receive updates of the blog through an email subscription. You can subscribe to the Scoutmaster Podcast on itunes. Please leave a comment or review a rating when you do. You can also access the podcast on your mobile device through Stitcher Smart Radio. It's pretty slick little app and it's free and you can get details for that@stitcher.com you can call me and leave a voicemail comment or question at 484-734-0002. You can also experience the wonders of ScoutMasterCG.com and the ScoutMaster Podcast through the vast panorama of social media outlets. That's right, you can follow us at Scoutmaster Blog on Facebook, tweet ScoutMasterCG on Twitter, and for admittance to the exclusive ScoutMaster CG circle. Search for Scoutmaster CG on Google. So you don't tweet, you don't face, you don't plus. That's all right, bunky. You can email me. Yeah, you can zoom right into the late 90s and send me an email. And you can address that to scoutmastercgorizon.net.

Let me tell you, this version of Taps is by guitarist Mark Magnussen. It's from an album called Patriotic Guitar Music and it's available on Amazon. I encourage you to get over there and get a copy of Mark's work. You might find it really useful for presentations or for background music, courts of honor, things like that. Who knows Mark Magnuson? Look him up on Amazon.com or over at itunes. The Scoutmaster Blog and the Scoutmaster Podcast are not official publications of the Boy Scouts of America, nor are they endorsed or sponsored by the Boy Scouts of America. No, it's just me talking into a microphone and maybe lending a hand to Scout leaders and having a little bit of fun along the way. That's all we're doing here.

Before we go, let's hear from our founder, Sir Robert Baden Powell. Sir Robert, good luck to you and good camping. Well, thank you, sir. Until next time.