Scoutmaster Podcast 35

This is Clark, and I want to take a moment to thank the hundreds of scouters all over the world who sponsor the podcast by being ScoutmasterCG.com backers and patrons. You can join them by going to ScoutmasterCG.com and following the support or be a patron links at the top of the page.

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. So we're driving to a camp out.

One of the scouts in the car turns to me and says, How is it that the deer know to cross at the deer crossing signs? Endless entertainment, right? Oh, well. Hey, this is Scoutmaster podcast number 35. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

In this edition, we're going to continue our discussion about youth troop leadership and the patrol system. And I've got a Scoutmaster Minute built in there. But I wanted to take a couple of minutes to talk to you about a book that I have found. And I've actually found this book, oh, probably 10 or 12 years ago. But I have found that somebody went to the trouble of making a PDF version of it and putting it online. And I recommend it to you if you're a student of history or you have an interest in the history of scouting.

The title of the book is The Left Handshake. And the subtitle is The Boy Scout Movement During the War, 1939 to 1945 by Hillary St. George Saunders. And this was originally published in 1949. And The Left Handshake is a record of what happened to scouting during the Second World War, not only in Great Britain, but in occupied Germany.

I think most of the time, or occupied Europe. I think most of the time we're pretty familiar with that part of our history of the Boy Scouts of America and the scrap drives and bond drives that scouts participated in over here.

And we were fortunate enough not to have been occupied or attacked on our shores to a great extent during the Second World War. But what happened to scouts who were in countries who were overrun and occupied by the Nazis? It's very, very interesting history. And I would recommend it to you. I will put a link on the blog to where you can find a PDF copy of the book, The Left Handshake.

Now, there's a personal connection that I have to that particular history in that 22 years ago this summer, I was part of the, oh gosh, I think it was the 8th quadrennial jamboree of the Polish scout movement in exile. Now, the Polish scouting movement was a very strong movement before the war. And, of course, when the Nazis overran Poland, they basically did away with scouting as the Poles knew it.

And during that time period as Poles escaped from the occupation and spread out all over the world and actually subsequent to the war, you know, during the diaspora time where they ended up going all over the world, they also took their scouting movement with them. And that scouting movement, as of 22 years ago, was still alive and well in all these different countries. And it was run just as it was run in Poland. And it was a vehicle for the families who had dispersed from Poland to teach their children Polish and some of the Polish national traditions and to involve them in scouting at the same time. And every four years, they would get together someplace in the world and have a jamboree. And they chose our scout camp as the location for that jamboree in 1988.

About 2,000 adults and youth came to our camp and celebrated the Polish scouting movement in exile. And it was interesting because it was the first time that they had had these events since the war where a scout unit from Poland actually managed to get out to attend the event. If you remember, in 1988, Lekwilenza and Solidarity were just beginning to make an impact in the political situation in Poland, which was still a communist government.

And so it was very exciting that these folks got out and were able to join their fellow scouts from all over the world in 1988. But I think one of the more particularly touching things, and it was very revelatory to me, was a reunion of those people who were present who had continued their scouting tradition in the concentration camps during the war.

Can you believe that? I mean, these were pretty small in number at the time because this was 40 years after the end of the Second World War. But these were folks who had been in concentration camps during the war and who had continued to use the scouting program to help them survive and to help them stay encouraged and help them stay together, which was pretty remarkable. I was also introduced to a man who was a scoutmaster during that time and who was in his late 80s at the time and who had taught his scouts to be saboteurs and taught them how to blow up trains and to generally interfere with the occupation forces.

So you'll find a lot of this reflected in this history by Hillary St. George Sanders, the one that's called the Left Handshake.

And I will have a link to that on the blog so that you can read it in PDF format. Well, I thought that that might interest some of you, but we'll go ahead and move along because we've got a lot to do.

So let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. Here we are with our second installment on building strong youth leadership and implementing the patrol system.

Now, the last time we talked a little, we tried to lay some basic ideas out. And the basic idea that I left you with is that this is an attitude adjustment, a change of outlook on the part of adults.

We need to educate ourselves about the program. My suggestion is that you look at it totally new. Look at it with a new set of eyes. One way to get the real basis of what happens in scouting is to go back and to read Baden Powell's little booklet called Aids to Scoutmastership. It's a very dated booklet as far as language goes and some of the terminology. But if you read it carefully, you will develop an appreciation for what the founder, Baden Powell, was doing when he developed the scouting program in the way that he did.

I will have a link to that on the blog. Part of this process is going to be replacing working towards some idealized version of scouting with immersing your scouts in a process. That's what the program is. It's a process. Scouting is founded not on a set of easily quantifiable goals. We aren't building efficiently functioning organizational units.

We're helping young men grow up into good people. And that's a process.

We're giving them a field of play and endeavor that has a broad definition of success so they can all succeed. We're planting seeds of personal responsibility, character, and virtue that grow not through a series of planned events, but through a process.

If your picture of scouting right now is a rank and file of perfectly behaved, perfectly uniform, perfectly skilled scouts, I got news. You're going to be disappointed. You have to accept that scouting is a process of giving boys the autonomy, responsibility, and authority to discover their own abilities and develop them at their own speed.

We can't make them grow. We can only create and preserve the conditions that encourage growth. That's the big basic underlying concept of the scout program.

Now, I've heard all of the excuses about why this won't work. That is that, you know, scouts won't take their leadership positions seriously. They won't plan things very well. And the whole thing will go spinning out of control if the adults aren't right there making plans and leading and making things happen.

We want things to go spinning out of control. We want mistakes to be made.

We want things to be imperfect. And that's hard to do if you have a vision of scouting that is aiming at some kind of perfect ideal. Forget about the perfect ideal and think about the process. You have to remember who we're talking about here. We're talking about adolescent boys. And they are one of the most unstable elements known to mankind.

They're capricious. They're short-sighted. They're inexperienced. They're immature. And they are naive.

Now, one sure way to keep them capricious, short-sighted, inexperienced, immature, and naive is to ask them to sit quietly by and let us more experienced, stable, and mature adults do all the leadership. I mean, otherwise, how are they going to be able to earn merit badges and advance in rank?

How will they learn to do anything? How will they develop in character?

How will they mature? All these things will happen by them being a scout and doing the things that scouts do and going through the process that is the scouting program.

Why is this true? Because the program works.

So once we have a really good appreciation of the program, of the process involved in it, then we have to start changing things. Now, these changes will often be sweeping fundamental changes.

Now, scouts are creatures of habit, but they're also excited and energized by change. They take on change very readily. They don't often find it upsetting or off-putting. Adults, on the other hand, usually pretty reluctant to change. We find it upsetting. We find it disquieting.

We find it strange. Much of the time, we're very resistant to change, almost to the point of irrational fear. And I said we because I include myself in the picture. I'm not preaching to you. I'm trying to couch all of this in the most friendly and understanding way possible because I've been there.

In practical day-to-day terms, what does this look like? Well, frankly, it looks disorganized and messy.

And that's okay because that's what we want it to look like. I'll arrive at our troop meeting. I open the doors. And shortly thereafter, the senior patrol leader and the patrol leaders and the other youth leaders will arrive.

Now, I might ask the senior patrol leader if he has everything ready to go for the evening or ask him to review the preparations with me. And I try and stay out of his hair because usually he's preparing things and getting things ready. And I'll tell you whatever he answers, I usually just say, good, it sounds like a plan.

What do you need from me? His typical answer is nothing.

So, as the other adults arrive, we'll be in a room away from the main meeting room. And we'll stay there. We'll catch up. We'll swap some stories for a while until one of the scouts alerts us to the opening ceremony. Then we'll go into the main meeting room.

You know, there's the scout oath, the law, the Pledge of Allegiance. We listen to the senior patrol leader talk about what's going to happen at the meeting. And we'll go back to our room and the scouts will go ahead and proceed with their meeting plans.

We adults, well, we usually have a few bits of business to discuss. I may have a couple of scoutmaster conferences or other discussions with individual scouts.

And now, I don't require the adults just to sit in this room and not look at anything. They are free to silently observe what is going on with the scouts. And I emphasize silently. Indeed, I will ask some of them to observe and be ready to offer observations later on in the meeting. But we kind of have a rule about interfering in the middle of a meeting. It's the boys' time.

They're on the field. They're playing the game. We're watching from the sidelines. And we're going to be majorly silent and be in the position of observers. One of the scouts will tell us when it's time for a closing. We'll go back to the meeting room.

The senior patrol leader will make his announcements. And then he'll turn things over to me for my scoutmaster's minute. Sometimes this will be a deep thought or an announcement. Or sometimes I just have a pretty lame joke, in the opinion of my scouts, at least. We close with the scoutmaster's benediction.

And then the patrol leader's council will meet for 10 or 15 minutes after the meeting. After this meeting, the senior patrol leader reviews the meeting they just had.

They talk about what went well, what didn't go well, and what they need to work on. He'll also review the preparations for the next couple of weeks. I might have something to say. I might want to ask some questions. And may ask if our assistant scoutmasters have anything to offer. And the assistant scoutmasters might be there in the room for this meeting.

But they understand that during the patrol leader's council meetings, they can listen quietly. And if they have a question or a comment, they can raise their hand until they're recognized by the senior patrol leader. The week directly after our monthly outing, our meeting night is a patrol leader's council combined with a board of review.

Now, the patrol leader's council will meet to make plans. They meet on their own, without any adults in the room. Once they've made their plans, they let me know. And myself and the other adults come in. And they listen to this senior patrol leader review the plans with us.

We may ask questions or make comments on the plans if we need to. But we're used to making our comments brief. On occasion, after this review, the patrol leader's council might need to reconvene and work a bit more. But often, that's the end of the evening.

When we go camping, the youth leadership meets a bit early on a Friday evening, typically. They get ready for the scouts. They have made their gear, transportation, and program plans ahead of time. Hopefully, they've done that. And at one point, the senior patrol leader will tell me they're ready to go. We load up and we take off.

We get to the camping spot. And the senior patrol leader and his patrol leaders look at the campground. They decide how they're going to set it up. And we get with it. The adults in attendance are assigned an area to set up.

And it is far enough away from the scouts so that we can observe. But we can't interfere without walking a bit of a distance. And camp gets set up. And the weekend goes like most of our meetings. The senior patrol leader leads. We observe and we participate when we're asked.

But otherwise, we're just watching. Now, all of this sounds idyllic and wonderful, doesn't it?

It sounds like we just skip along without any problems or setbacks because we have these hyper-competent uber scouts. And I got to tell you, nothing could be farther from the truth. What I described to you was a very brief overview of an idealized kind of situation.

So when we're looking at the program with new eyes, one of the things, hopefully, that we'll realize is that when the going is messy, things are working. Our scouts are just like yours. They're sometimes incompetent and cavalier and unmotivated. They make mistakes and oversights, both large and small. They're subject to all the vicissitudes of their age. And we adults, me included, are often frustrated or disheartened and impatient and angry every once in a while.

But we don't want it any other way. Not for a moment. This is the way that it's supposed to be. This is the process that builds character, leadership, and maturity. It's messy, indefinite, and unpredictable. It is scouting.

So you might ask, well, how in the world can you sit by and watch this go on? How can you let the boys go out there and, you know, maybe they've not planned properly or something like that and they have a real rough time of it?

Well, we're always watching for anything that is going to cross the boundaries of propriety and safety. And we will step in. We'll step in and we'll stop things if they are unsafe or if they are outside of the values expressed in the scouting program. I'll tell you how often this happens. This happens once every three to four months. We've got, over time, we've been fortunate in having scouts who've developed a really good idea of safety and a really good idea of propriety and what the scouting program is.

So they stay pretty focused on it. But we're not always putting our oar in and telling the boys they need to do something differently.

And the other piece of that answer is how can you stand by and watch this happen? Well, once you've looked at the program from this perspective and you've seen that it is a process of things rather than a series of events or, you know, some kind of presentation that adults prepare for scouts, that it's a process of things. You grow in confidence in the process's ability to do what scouting does, and that is make decent human beings and help boys mature, help boys gain character, self-confidence, and ability.

So now you're convinced, I hope, that approaching the program with a set of new eyes to re-approach the way that you do things in your troop. And it's going to encourage you to re-approach the patrol system and youth leadership with a renewed vigor and appreciation for what it can do.

Well, if I've got you to that point, now you've got to say, well, what about the scouts? How am I going to deal with the scouts? Because these are all new ideas to them, and I'm not really sure exactly how I'm going to get them to buy into it and make this work. And that's where we're going to pick up next time around. We're going to talk about where your role is in training and preparing scouts as far as leadership goes and as far as bringing them into the idea of strong youth leadership and the patrol system really hitting on all eight cylinders within their troop.

That's right. It's time for a Scoutmaster's Minute. A scout is brave. Yep. A scout can face danger. He might be afraid, but he can still face it.

He has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right, even if others laugh at him or threaten him. That's real bravery in my book. Chutzpah is a great old Yiddish word that has been defined as a combination of gall and nerve and guts and presumption and arrogance. I mean, it might not be as noble as the connotations that we attach to bravery. And it may not be that all brave people have chutzpah, but those with chutzpah, baby, they are brave in one way or another. I mean, it takes real chutzpah to stand up to society.

Our Scouts win popularity or risk ostracism at the shifting standards of their peers. Do you remember that?

Remember? One day, one thing was cool and you go to school the next day and it's not cool anymore. There's no more unforgiving and intense and capricious society than the one we encounter when we're teenagers, you know. It takes chutzpah to be a scout in that society, to stand out and to achieve in a world that often belittles anyone who dares to explore their own potential.

But we've got chutzpah, right? Because a scout is brave.