Avoiding Advancement Clinkers

I heard somewhere that a Unit Commissioner read the new Guide to Advancement and said: ‘Council and National expect us to set requirements for being active and if they eventually find them too strict OR too lax they will step in and start setting them.’

Sounded like a clinker to me. A clinker is a lump of waste that can build up in a coal furnace or forge and put the fire out. It seems a fitting description of the innuendo, rumor, and disinformation that we sometimes hear repeated in Scouting. You may remember Darrin McGavin as the old man doing battle with the furnace in ‘A Christmas Story’ shouting (among other things) “It’s a Clinker!”.

I re-read the section in the Guide to Advancement and couldn’t figure out how this commissioner made such a leap of logic. What I read is a process that incorporates reasonable standards for being active if they exist but in no way demands them. It even goes beyond that and requires that we must consider things other than unit based standards in evaluating ‘active’. So I checked in with a member of the National Advancement Team who worked on the Guide to Advancement. Here’s his reply: ‘You are right on target. We simply attempted to address the fact that many units already have numeric standards for ‘active’. No one is now expected to set standards if they don’t have them. This kind of misinterpretation is exactly what we want to avoid.

Please correct whoever said it before they spread that particular rumor around any further.’ We can all debunk these clinkers by consulting the widely available BSA references and applying some common sense.

I am wary anytime I hear someone say that Council or National has done something or is about to do something. Some folks like to impress others by appearing to be on the inside or ahead of the curve.

Sometimes this desire causes them to come up with suppositions that have no basis in fact.

Folks who are on the inside or ahead of the curve seldom go around spouting off and trying to impress others. JAN 28 - Reading that last paragraph a day later it sounds mean spirited and judgmental.

I can be guilty of the same thing I am accusing others of and quite possibly have been so with this very post! So I would like to rethink it a bit: I am wary anytime I hear someone say that Council or National has done something or is about to do something. We all like to be on the inside or ahead of the curve.

Sometimes we can be guilty of stretching our own opinions and giving them the air of officialdom – the final test of veracity is whether or not what we are saying is aligned with policy written in black and white.

While we can wrangle over interpretations in the end there needs to be a definitive answer. My goal is to seek out definitive answers to what have been some very debatable questions. and hopefully save us all some angst.

I think in this case we have a definitive answer.