Centennary of the Boy Scouts of America
Sir Robert Baden Powell had a very simple idea: The aim of the Scout training is to improve the standard of our future citizenhood, especially in Character and Health; to replace Self with Service, to make the lads individually efficient morally and physically, with the object of using that efficiency for service for their fellow-men.
Baden Powell’s Aids to Scoutmastership An idea so simple that it would soon find its way around the world because anyone could apply its principles; To an outsider Scouting must at first sight appear to be a very complex matter, and many a man is probably put off from becoming a Scoutmaster because of the enormous number and variety of things that he thinks he would have to know in order to teach his boys. But it need not be so, if the man will only realize the following points:
The aim of Scouting is quite a simple one.
The Scoutmaster gives to the boy the ambition and desire to learn for himself by suggesting to him activities which attract him, and which he pursues till he, by experience, does them aright. (Such activities are suggested in Scouting for Boys).
The Scoutmaster works through his Patrol Leaders.
Baden Powell’s Aids to Scoutmastership W.D.
Boyce discovered the movement quite by accident during a visit to London and brought it to the United States. His newly minted Boy Scouts of America found an eager following and spread throughout the country. One hundred years later the survival of the B.S.A. is a testament to simple work carried out by millions of men and women on the behalf of tens of millions of boys (and now girls). Our future depends upon an ever-renewed sense of relevance: Over 100 years, you get a little arthritic and bureaucratic. We are steeped in tradition, which is a good thing, but we’re not particularly good at innovation and renewal. We don’t want to abandon tradition, but we want to be nimble … We run the risk of becoming irrelevant if we don’t adapt to things that attract kids today, but we run the risk of losing our way if we abandon the principles, which is the Scout Law.
Chief Scout Executive Robert Mazzuca This week around 5 million of us will carry on this simple, vital work in every corner of this vast country. We stand on the shoulders of many more than we can call by name but whom we know none-the-less. We can revel for a moment and then turn back to our work with an eye to the future.