Scoutmaster Podcast 354

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. Hey, we had a live chat this past week one morning for an hour or two, and the penguin story came up again, And so I haven't mentioned it in a long, long time.

So here's the penguin joke. Okay, We ready. Two penguins are paddling a canoe through the Sahara Desert.

The penguin in front turns to the penguin in the back of the canoe and says: where's your paddle? The penguin in the back of the canoe says: yep, it sure does.

Okay, discuss amongst yourselves.

This is podcast number 354.. Hey,

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green with another non-standard podcast. But that's just the way this is working right now. I hope you don't mind.

Last week I published a post about girls in the BSA And this was intended to be simple, to boil things down to, you know, the real kind of crux of the issue, to share my point of view and how that point of view developed. And in the post I talked about that because what I was talking about was our first trip to Kandersteg International Scout Center. Pardon me, if you've heard me, if I'm repeating myself, but Kandersteg International Scout Center is in Switzerland. You go there during the summer.

You're there with three or four hundred scouts from all over the world in many different scouting organizations, And the interesting thing that we were going to encounter in our first trip there in 2011 was the fact that most of the rest of the world is scouting as co-ed. So I was kind of curious about how that would work and what and how my scouts would react to it and how I would react to it myself. It wasn't totally sold on this being a very good idea. I had my concerns, in other words.

So we got to Kandersteg. It took my scouts a very brief period of time, Of course.

They and the scouts, you know, as they got out and about, started meeting scouts from all over the world and and and saw that girls and boys were in scouts together, you know, on the, exactly the same organization, on the same footing. They shared patrols, They shared troops.

They thought it was novel and unusual, And then they just immediately accepted the idea that a scout is a scout. I didn't even hear him discuss it all that much. It took me slightly longer than them to get that idea And it really was that simple. Here it is: Here's co-ed scouting. It seems to work. It seems to work fine, And in the discussions I've had with scouts from other parts of the world who are in a co-ed scouting organization, and some of them that were there during the time that the organization went from single sex to co-ed, when I've asked them about their experiences and things, they don't seem to be all that different from the experiences that I have had, just that there happened to be girls involved.

So I want to say again: it really is just that simple. That's my thinking. That's the way that this evolved. It was that simple. Hey, this seems to work, Why not, Let's go for it. It's not political correctness, It's not a feminist agenda, whatever that is.

It's just the way that my personal thinking changed on the idea. I'm going to talk about how folks responded to the post. Some of the things that they were concerned about cited organizational issues and more on that later on. It's not that I wasn't thinking about those things.

I just decided that they were unimportant and they clouded the discussion And what I wanted to do was get things down to a very basic question, And that question is: should gender define scouting and should gender define our children's opportunities and futures? I think that's the question we need to answer, So let's focus on that for a moment. We get confused easily, especially if you're my age.

I'm going to be referring to my age several times probably in this discussion, So let me tell you: I'm 57 years old. I know that we get confused sometimes or we use interchangeably the term sex and gender.

Sex refers to the biological difference between males and females, So that's chromosome and reproductive organs and hormones. That's biological differences. Gender refers to the cultural differences and roles that we impose on and expect of men and women according to those biological differences.

So I'm using the term gender here advisedly. Biology is something we're born with. Gender is something that we learned. Let me say that again: Biology is something that we're born with.

The gender roles and expectations that we have is something that we learn Now. If you feel uncomfortable talking about gender now, you're really not going to like the next 20 years. I mean, this is a high profile subject.

It's hotly politicized and there are very strong opinions about it. Some of what I'm talking about today is in the political sphere of things right now, but let's not get distracted from the very simple question.

I'll repeat the simple question again: Should gender define scouting and should gender define our children's opportunities and futures? My answer to that question is no. Gender should not determine our children's opportunities and futures. It should not define scouting.

So I'm in favor of the idea that the BSA, the organization that I'm a part of, should welcome girls as members. Now, not everybody agreed with me, and that was no big surprise, as I expected, You know.

So let's take a look at the nature of the disagreements and see what they bring to the discussion. If you want to break it down in metrics, 45% of the responses I received were absolutely positive- Yes, I agree that this is a step forward that we should take.

37% of the responses I received were absolutely negative- No way, and 18% thought that it was probably a good idea, but they had some sort of concern about making it happen or some sort of caveat that they wanted to impose if we were to do this. Now, more than half of the negative responses were reasonably respectful. The other half were kind of dismissive and were like about things that weren't really related to the things I had been discussing in the post.

So I had to wonder if they had really read about it at all. A very diminishing few of the negative responses were just downright mean and nasty or profane and I excluded them from comments on the post or I hid those comments on Facebook. The Scouters are usually very good folks And even if, when we disagree, they can speak respectfully to someone rather than speaking past them.

So there was a very, very few instances where people were kind of out of line. So, as far as the disagreements go, I think it's safe to divide them into two broad categories, the first being organizational issues and the second being gender related issues.

So let's talk about the organizational issues first. Now, everybody who's listening to this is probably the member of a scouting organization, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that organizations are not scouting. The worldwide scouting movement is something bigger and broader and more important than any organizational structure that purports the containant.

What do I mean by that? Well, the BSA, the Girl Scouts, the Girl Guides, the World Organization, the Scouting Movement, any national organization is an organization that, while it promotes and enables people to have scouting, it's not scouting itself. And that distinction becomes important in this kind of a discussion, because we don't want to make a decision about this based on what's best for the organization.

We want to make a decision about this: what's best for young people. So I'm all about getting things into single sentences, And if I want to get my work as a scouter into a single sentence that is as simple as possible, it would be this: that is, to give young people in my community the opportunity to be scouts. That's my whole job, That's what I do.

So there are things that are going to help me do this and things that are going to stand in my way. If the organization I'm part of is standing in the way of that mission, I need to consider whether or not I want to remain a part of that organization If that organization isn't going to change.

Now organizations have to be kind of impenetrable and inflexible. I like to think of them like ships.

OK, so these organizations are ships and the ocean is the culture and the society and the world that we're living in, And organizations need to be safe and stable, And that's this you know, and that's important for ships too. So they're fairly rigid. You don't want the ocean inside your ship because that's not going to work very well.

So to stay afloat over all this, they have to be this way. And that impenetrability and inflexibility creates a lot of drag, especially when it comes to evolution and change, And this drag is commensurate with the size and the scope of the organization. The bigger the ship, the longer it takes to turn right. The ocean of culture is, of course, much wider and deeper and more fluid and changeable than the organizational ships that travel over them.

So scouting organizations usually embrace change very slowly. Individual scouts and scouts can embrace change very quickly. Any organization of national scope and a century and more than a century of service is going to be likely to have found itself behind the curve from time to time. Big national organizations are often kind of reluctant to face cultural realities, especially when they are championing a set of values and ethics that are supposed to be unchangeable and unauthorable. But but scouting organizations have changed how they interpret and express their values many, many times. Some of these changes were motivated internally, some by external pressure, And you can't adjust your core principles based on petitions or leaving them up to a majority vote.

But you can evolve right. You can evolve in the way that you express them, And that means making changes, and change is not all bad.

So what should be important to us as scouts is following the best ethical and moral path. If that means change, then we change, Then we sort out how the organization handles the change.

We can't begin with the idea of protecting the organization right. We have to get the ethics and morals right.

So that's why arguments over whether this is best for the BSA organizationally, or if it will hurt the girl scouts, or this idea that the only reason that girls want to become boy scouts is because girl scouts isn't up to snuff, So let's change girl scouts instead of allowing girls to come into boy scouts- All of those issues don't touch the central, simple question And I really am past worrying about them. And I don't mean that to be dismissive, I don't mean that to sound snarky, But you know I think I explain myself reasonably well. The answers to this question can't be decided on issues of organizational imperatives alone And to my mind organizational imperatives are unimportant when it comes to answering this question.

So the other chief objections came from gender issues, The idea that boys and girls and men and women are so basically different from each other that they must have their own safe spaces to express those differences apart from each other. And one often repeated idea in the people who don't think girls should be a part of the BSA was that boys will find the girls so distracting, that they can't- quote- be themselves around girls. There was also the idea that boys could not compete with girls who mature faster than boys.

And then some very few asserted this idea of a war on boys and that boys were no longer allowed to behave as boys And they were being over feminized by schools And you know a lot of things. That kind of started to encroach on the political arena, that they're no longer allowed to express boy behavior, whatever that is, and that they're being made ashamed of themselves for being boys, And these were usually pretty strident objections.

I did say that the negative reactions to this are fairly predictable, because when you take a privileged group of people and you say, well, you should probably think about letting other people enjoy these privileges to, it feels like an attack. You know, and I understand that, I really do understand that It wasn't really meant to be snarky. It was like, OK, I understand that when you hear this proposal, that you're going to look on it as an attack coming from the outside. But it's not. It's not. I'm not on the outside.

I've been a BSA volunteer for like 35 years and this, No, this is not an outside attack. This is an honest proposal that we could probably be a better organization if we looked at taking this way forward. But back to these gender issues. OK, nobody specified what precisely behavior or expressions boys can only develop amongst themselves when girls are not present. I can't think of one positive behavior or one positive self image or one ethical or moral ideal that meets that definition.

What can't boys express that's a positive self image, that's good behavior, that's ethical and moral, only amongst themselves, without girls present? I don't understand what that would be. I can't think of one thing- And if you can, let me know, But I really can't think of one positive thing that boys can only express when girls aren't around, And I'm going to say this to there.

I want to make this very clear. There are a lot of things that I, at my age, have learned about being a man that I have had to unlearn and I've had to reject, And I think there's a lot of things that women my age were conditioned to do and accept about themselves that they have had to overcome.

So people my age have not necessarily found the gender conditioning we received as children to be absolutely positive, And as scouts we should not perpetuate any of these negative gender stereotypes. We're in the character building business, And I think we can skip over the idea that women of good character and men of good character are some fundamentally different kind of thing that can only develop in gender specific environments and say that we can do this together.

So we want to develop young people of good character. So the other branch of the gender based issues that were used as a counter argument to my proposal was 11 to 16 year old. Girls are more mature than boys and boys don't have a fighting chance to take on leadership opportunities. Some people said a completely different thing: that the boys would run rough shot over the girls and everything, And I don't think either case is true.

But even if they were true, it wouldn't change my answer to the simple question we started with: Should gender define our children's opportunities and futures? No, it shouldn't.

So what I didn't want to do with this post- and I think that clouds the issues- try and turn it into some kind of an academic discussion, citing and counter, citing articles and studies and things like that, because there are plenty of studies out there. There are plenty of articles out there that will give you adequate fodder to have long debates about the influence of gender conditioning in the way that we treat boys and girls, the negative and positive aspects of that, and the difference between how gender and biology define our opportunities and choices and futures.

But I want to return to the one simple question: Should scouting be defined by gender and should gender define our children's opportunities and their futures? I think the very clear answer is no.

Gender should not define our children's opportunities and futures And I think that a coed atmosphere when they're in these developmental years would be a very positive and important thing to have in scouting to better serve the youth in our communities. I'm fine with people having a different opinion about that. I'm fine with them.

I'm fine with chartered organizations being able to choose whether they want to be fully coed, where they want to have kind of a separate but equal program going on, where there's some separation in the genders, or whether they just want to continue on and have a single sex organization, whether it be boys or girls, and then let families make the choice of what unit they want to be a part of. Don't think it causes a great deal of trouble. Don't think it makes a big problem for anybody.

So there's no doubt going to be some reaction to the podcast, both negative and positive, And that's fine. This is a good discussion to have And scouts are pretty good at having respectful conversations about issues over which we disagree.

But remember the single, simple question: Should gender define scouting and should gender define our children's opportunities and futures? That's the question that we have to answer. All the other organizational imperatives and things like that are not as important as answering that single question in an ethical and a moral sense.