Scoutmaster Podcast 324

I'm Bill McFarland and I'm the Scoutmaster with Troop 8 in Kittsfield, Massachusetts. This edition of the Scoutmasters podcast, sponsored by Packers Like Me.

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. Well, like you, I do my best to try and keep up with all the developments in the scouting arts and sciences and I make sure to keep abreast of all of the research work that is being done by brave Scouters in the large Baden Collider in Zern, Switzerland, And this comes through this morning. After extensive research, It has been determined that the number of mosquitoes in a given location is in inverse proportion to the amount of repellent available. Sounds right to me. Another, another mosquito joke.

Okay,

Hey, this is podcast number three hundred and twenty four. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Oh, let's take a look at the mailbag. Jeff Peters is an assistant Scoutmaster with Boy Scout Troop 851 in Ellicott City, Maryland.

So I just read article you posted several years ago called the overprotected child. You're spot on. Thanks for all the good work you do with the blog.

Well, thanks, Jeff. I will put a link to that article in the podcast notes. It is something to. It is definitely something to think about, and it's been a while since we looked at that. Paul Kurzenbach said thanks for posting. All of the information on the blog is very helpful.

All the best. Well, thank you, Paul. Also heard from Greg Brennam who says: I've just come back from summer camp with a report that all of my new scouts did the requirements in the Trail to Eagle program for Scout Tenderfoot, Second Class and First Class rank.

Now do I take the Trail to Eagle director's word for it and sign off their books? Do I talk to these scouts and see if they know the requirements? That kind of sounds like retesting in my opinion, and I read about that on your blog and I don't want to do it.

So I'm interested in your thoughts. These younger scout programs that are very common at camps nowadays- this is a question that comes up perennially.

What exactly are they doing in those programs and is participation in those programs a fulfillment of rank requirements? And based on what I know of the program at our camp, it is not.

So there are four components to advancement right: A scout learns, a scout's tested, a scout's reviewed and a scout is recognized. So I think it's safe to say when a scout goes through this kind of program at camp where they cover all of the requirements between scout and first class that they maybe, maybe have done step one. A scout has learned- and I say maybe because think about what's going on in this kind of program- right, They are probably part of a very large group. There's going to be a few instructors and a lot of scouts.

They're at summer camp so they might be paying attention to what's going on or they might not be. They may have plenty of time to practice the skills or to talk about the knowledge required to fulfill the requirement, or they may not have taken much time with it at all.

They might have just talked about it and said: well, you know, on a future camp out or working with your troop, now you know what to do and then you'll have the chance to do it and fulfill the requirement, something like that. Greg, if you look carefully at the list you were given or the description of the program, you probably see that there's some kind of a statement to the effect that your scouts were at least in the area when the specific skills were demonstrated or the knowledge was shared, Not that they were tested on their acquisition of the knowledge or competence in the skills. I know that's made very clear for the program at our camp. Scouts who participate in that program are not completing requirements, They're just learning about them.

And one thing that we do while we're a camp is we make sure that our older scouts, our youth leaders, are aware that they have the opportunity to sit down with younger scouts during the day and talk to them about the requirements that they went over in that program, And there is possibly times when they'll be able to sign off some of those requirements right there at camp. So that's something that comes up each year around this time.

So it's a perennial question and I hope that helps. Hey, we also heard from Larry Gonzalez, who's a Scoutmaster in Iwa Beach, Hawaii, and Larry said: I just started listening to your podcasts in June and I really love them. They've given me some great ideas and I will become a backer and I look forward to contributing to your work in the future.

Well, thanks so much, Larry. I did mention that Larry became a backer during last week's podcast. You can support the work that I'm doing in a couple of different ways. The first is doing what Larry did: become a backer, and that's like making a one time payment. Then there's another way to do it, which is to become a patron, which is making a monthly subscription payment of $5 or more through a service called Patreon.

Now, both of these things are fairly easy to do and there are premiums involved for becoming a backer or a patron. Go to any page at scoutmastercgcom and look up.

In the top right hand corner There's a link that says support and there's one that says be a patron. Follow those links, find out what's going to work for you, become a patron or a backer, and I'll make sure to thank you personally on our next podcast. I do my best to have a couple of live chat sessions every week. These are usually Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. What you do is go over to scoutmastercgcom and you'll see the live chat link down in the bottom right hand corner of the page.

Or keep an eye on our Facebook feed and our Twitter feed, because I'll always provide a link through those so that you can come and join in the chat. And in addition to all the frequent flyers that showed up this past week, George Shields, who's an assistant scoutmaster with Troop 147 in Knoxville, Tennessee, stopped in and George had some questions about starting a venture crew, and sometimes we talk about helpful and serious subjects like that, and sometimes we just talk, And, as I mentioned last week, the podcast going to be taking a break for the next few weeks.

While I'm off to summer camp and then on to a high adventure canoe trip up in Algonquin in Ontario, Canada, I will queue up some old favorites from past podcast for you, and we'll be back with our 325th edition of the Scoutmaster podcast on Monday, August 22nd. Now, before we go away on the break, though, I want to take some time and talk about the future of scouting, and that's going to take up the remainder of the podcast.

So let's get started, shall we?

So what is the future of scouting? I mean, we're busy people, right, Scouters are busy people.

We may not have a whole lot of time to sit down and think through what the future is going to be like, but I think it's an interesting question to ask, and I'll start off by saying I'm thoroughly optimistic about the future of scouting. Scouting's been around for more than a century now.

It is such an inherently human endeavor I think it will survive and thrive and remain relevant where people value and understand what it does for young people. Our future is going to be partially defined by our past, isn't it?

I mean, we have to understand what scouting is and a little bit about our own history before we can project into the future and begin to get an idea of what things will be like. And when I say scouting here, I'm not talking about a particular organization. Organizations are very mercurial. Scouting is just what it is. It's an idea, and the organizations that we've formed to contain that idea.

Well, they can change, They can come and go, but scouting will continue on. And when you boil things down, scouting is very, very simple.

We have one aim, and that is to develop character in young people, and one method, and that is the patrol method. Everything else, everything else, is just window dressing, really, And I know that sounds like a vast oversimplification, but think about this for a moment. Imagine you're taking scouting to young people anywhere in the world, Absent any big organization, absent any resources at all. The whole thing is going to be about developing character in young people by applying the patrol method. Doesn't matter what you call the small group of young people that you're working with. You can call it a patrol, you can call it a Dan, you can call it a crew, whatever It's.

Still, those concepts are going to be in play and boiled down to its basic essentials. That's what scouting is: Developing character in young people through applying the patrol method.

I mean, character is the essence of good citizenship, isn't it An ideal good citizen would benefit from and contribute to the society in which they live? Right, The most human thing we can do is to look out for somebody else, to put their well-being above that of our own, And the ideal of goodwill and family, expanded beyond our own self-interest, is at the heart of scouting.

So in this work of developing character in young people through the patrol method, we balance two very important things. And to shed a little light on what I mean by that, I want to go back to 1922, where Baden Powell spoke to the Third International Congress of Moral Education in Geneva, Switzerland, And the title of his address was Education in Love in Place of Fear.

What a great title, huh? I mean, that was 94 years ago and I'll bet you didn't realize that Baden Powell was one of the first hippies. I mean: education in love in place of fear. What an interesting concept.

So it's 1922. It's in the aftermath of the First World War And Baden Powell goes to speak about scouting as a movement for world peace. And Baden Powell's argument in that address was that scouting, when properly understood and applied, balanced two inherently human tendencies to foster peaceful cooperation. In his address he quoted British educator Edmund Holmes who said the scout movement owes its success to the fact that it makes due provision for the satisfaction of two imperious needs of human nature: The need to realize one's own self and the need to work with and for others. In the scout philosophy of education the balance between the claims of the individual and of the communal self is steadily maintained. To achieve and maintain this balance should be the primary aim of all who are interested in education.

So scouting balances what Holmes called these two imperious needs of man's nature: to realize one's own self and the need to work with and for others. And when you balance those two things what do you have? You have peace, cooperation.

I think if you kind of look over the last century of scouting and think about your own scouting experiences, I think we can agree that scouting goes awry when its use is limited to self-development or a method of education or a leadership school. I mean, our aim is definitely helping an individual develop character right, But that is kind of wrapped in this interesting paradox. We develop individual character by balancing your individual needs against the needs of the broader group, the broader community. And we do that, beginning in the patrol, because we understand that the greatest benefit of the service we render to others is what we derive ourselves from that service. That's kind of hard to get sometimes, because scouting is not about developing yourself exclusively, It's about serving the welfare of others.

So if scouting just becomes like a merit badge delivery system or a leadership development school, if we just focus on those very limited aspects of things, we miss the mark. If we invest in, I don't know, just having all kinds of grand events or cutting edge facilities or just over-emphasized learning, the skills of the outdoors, all of these elements of scouting that work very well together. In isolation they kind of throw the balance of everything off.

So what is the future of scouting? That's where we started, right.

So if you think about this, when we speak about the future we talk in terms of technology, and no doubt technology will have a big role in shaping our future. But there's more than technology to think about, because our future is also going to be defined by the way we relate to each other and the path that our lives take and that is shaped by the content of our character, and that aspect of humanity will always shape our future.

So scouting remains relevant. We form the character that forms the future.

Now I'm tempted to say something like in these troubled times and things like that. But look, if you take the past century and you don't just focus on scouting but you look at the broader things that are going on in the world, there's always been instability and troubled times.

I mean, there's been two world wars and there's been all kinds of cultural upheavals and socioeconomic upheavals and political upheavals and things like that. And what gives me confidence in the future is the consistency and the reliability of the concepts that underlie the scouting movement.

So my outlook is optimistic and pro-topian. So there's a word you might not have heard before: pro-topian.

It's an interesting word that I believe was coined by the author Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly is always on my reading list. If you aren't familiar with Kevin's work, his latest book is titled The Inevitable Twelve Trends That Will Shape Our Future, and I'll throw a link to it in the podcast notes if that kind of thing's interest you.

But here's what Kevin has to say about pro-topia. Pro-topia is a state that is better today than yesterday, although it might only be a little better- And so pro-topia is middle ground to utopia and dystopia.

So we're not headed towards utopia, where everything is sweetness and light, and we're not headed toward dystopia. It's more realistic and measured to say that our future is pro-topian, And that idea is a little harder to visualize because there are as many problems as benefits in the future and the complex interaction of working and broken, as Kevin Kelly says, is very hard to predict. And I don't know.

There was just something in the definition of that term that I really identified with scouting, because we have this utopian set of goals set in front of us and we know that we have good things happen. We have bad things happen, We have an inherent level of chaos dealing with young people, But it gives me hope to think in terms of pro-topia, because that means that tomorrow needs to be just a little bit better than today. It doesn't have to be utopia.

We may lose a little ground now and again, but the general trend, things are getting better. And listen, I know that we all look for some kind of assurance that our future is going to be even remotely positive, and that kind of assurance can be very difficult to find in the cycle of endlessly bad news that we seem to be steeped in from day to day to day. If you're going to pay attention to the news you're probably going to be discouraged.

But if you look at the young people you're working with and scouting, I think that lightens things up a little. I mean, look at the promise and potential there. Aim at the heart of the matter and give these young people your best effort. Don't allow the negatives in the world to define your outlook. Look at the potential in the young people that you're working with.

The future of scouting is bright and relevant so long as we understand what it is and we apply it with a lot of optimism. Because scouting is much greater than a hedge against the perilous future or a return to a storied past that never existed. It's a transformative individual journey following the scout oath and law, very direct statements of the virtues and obligations that have defined stable, enlightened societies throughout human history. That's our pro-topian future in scouting. That's what we scouters get to make happen. One scout at a time Isn't that great.

So let's go out and get with the program and give it our best. What do you say