The trouble with the American Boy Scouts goes back to James West prevailing over Ernest Seton in 1915. Seton was the "wild at heart" guy, West was the bureaucrat and lawyer who wanted scouting to turn boys into model citizens. Baden-Powell marketed scouting directly to boys, West marketed scouting to boys' church going parents.
Scouting always had a compliance aspect to it, but American scouting particularly so. The structure was fine in a world where boys lacked it, not so much as boys started experiencing one of the most structured childhoods in history. Compare to the UK where scouting is thriving and you have ~100 000 kids on waiting lists. Despite being coed for a long time, the UK scouting brand is adventure, Bear Grylls was chief scout (largely a ceremonial position) for 15 years.
Join the UK Scouts for adventure (and you may get to hang out with girls), join the American Boys Scouts to work on your badges, stand at attention and learn obedience. Yes, that is a simplification and I don't want to discount the positive experiences many have had with the BSA, but that has been core to its public image for more than 100 years. How much of the Boy Scouts historical success came from the parents, not the boys themselves?
"Part of being a man is about making your mark on the world, not just having the world make its mark on you. It’s about having agency and the ability to, when necessary, defy convention and external pressure and withstand the heat for doing so. Nothing about the Scouts suggests that the organization itself operates on that principle."
Exactly, that has always been one of its selling points. The parts that go against that and are remembered fondly were the remnants of the legacies of people like Baden-Powell and Seton.
Edit: One important caveat wrt to the UK reference. Until very recently they had a good record of managing coed environments in away that it did not end up primarily catering for girls. This is observation does not really apply anymore.
I was a little harsh on West, he was a thoroughly decent guy but he actually had no interest in the outdoors, understandable as he had polio as a kid. Meanwhile the Boy Scouts grew out of a war that is known for the most dishonorable conduct by the British military in history with war crimes and concentration camps in which 26000 women and children died. Baden-Powell is not directly associated with that but was still an active general in a war where that was policy and at no point in his life ever distanced himself from what happened. So no reason to make West the bad guy.
Nevertheless, the public face of BSA masculinity that West helped build is exactly what you have been criticizing for years now. I am not saying it is better now, just that there is no reason to want to go back to the old version. West, Seton and Baden-Powell actually had quite different visions of what scouting should be, no reason to stick to the Norman Rockwell version.
Thank you Aaron. This piece really struck me in the heart as I became an Eagle Scout nearly 50 years ago. It was a crucial rite of passage in my life. I want to throw something out there I've been considering lately. There is so much emphasis on building and dynamism, but so little thought given to maintenance. It seems we want to completely destroy the old things, then rebuild with little to no consideration for first principles (see Chesterton's Fence). Much like denominational churches, in Boy Scouts, it seems we abandoned first principles, and instead of maintaining the purpose, we tried to over-accommodate the changing culture. Yes, there will always be some adaptation required, but anchoring on first principles is crucial since they tend to transcend time. I often wonder if the modern megachurch represents a return to first principles that the denominational church abandoned and represented a new way for the church to maintain its relevance to culture while returning to its first principles. This is all conjecture on my part and you may disagree, but it is a hypothesis I'm trying to test.
The thing about the San Francisco video having mostly black and white people and very little Asian people is something that isn’t unique to just San Francisco. In the UK, there are over twice as many South Asian people as black people, but if you watch any British television, you would think that black people make up a third of the population while South Asian people are a tiny minority. Black people are just far more represented in the media than other non-white minority groups.
I volunteer for Scouts in Canada where we've been co-ed for 25+ years. IMO, the issue of wokeness is an annoying red herring (annoying because it's shoved at us but can be ignored). Scouts lost their focus. Baden-Powell said we're a school of the outdoors. In whatever part of Scouts I lead (I've worked with the youngest to the oldest), I have an overriding ethic: we must do at least ONE thing per month that will scare your mom. If you focus on the outdoors and on the adventure (school of the outdoors), you will get the tradition and the scouts you seek.
Yes, Scouts also need strong leaders, but what organization doesn't? Without the leadership, who leads and acts as the role model. Given the scandals around Scouts I understand the hesitancy to avoid it. As Aaron has said (and I try to take it to heart), it's my job to build others up. I do my best to take on that mantle of responsibility and try to encourage others to join me.
As a member of BSA in the 2000s I would observe that there was an increasing amount of involved mothers (mine included). Some would call it stereotyping but looking back I see it often led to a lot of unnecessary drama. I would also say that similar to fundamentalist churches there was a strong strain of “all or nothing” involvement demands which pushed out a lot of members who got busier as they moved into high school (myself included).
I was in Cub Scouts in the early 1990’s. This was at a Catholic grade school, which drew from a big city and a wealthy suburb. In my class, there were three Cub Scout dens alone in a pack of 10-12 dens. At the time, it seemed like a thriving Cub Scout pack. I enjoyed and learned a lot during my time in scouts.
One thing that I didn’t think of at the time, but do now, was all but one of the den leaders in my grade were moms. Also, the pack scoutmaster was a deacon/teacher who is in jail today for crimes he did then. Needless to say, of the 20-25 boys in my class who were Cub Scouts, no one became a Boy Scout.
Looking back, it is bittersweet. I did some fun things in scouts, but it felt like we missed out on a lot. I do wonder if more dads were leading it if the results would have been different. The dads did get involved coaching sports. The other extra-curriculars at that time, the school had a group called Room Mothers. Room Fathers would have got weird reactions then. Virtually all of us boys moved onto sports at the school.
On the Boy Scouts, I think your points are all valid. Back in the 1990s, my experiences with Scouts were mixed. One thing I'll say though is that even then, for some reason, my Scoutmaster's overbearing wife was too involved. She came to summer camp, seemingly just to nag us, when I initially thought avoiding that sort of thing was the bare minimum value proposition that Scouts was offering me. Now, I legitimately needed to get my crap together, but to a teenage boy, being informed of this by a respected male authority figure just comes across differently than from a harridan of a woman. Isn't that the whole idea? I wasn't the only member of the troop that thought this.
I also picked up stories of Eagle Scouts doing much cooler things in the old days than we were allowed to. It really felt to me, even in the 90s, that I was coming in even after the good old days were over. And yet the decline in the 30 years since is clearly palpable.
Needless to say, I didn't make Eagle Scout.
Reminds me of the Tony Soprano line, from the pilot: "It's good to be in something from the ground floor, and I came too late for that, I know. But lately I've been getting a feeling that I came at the end. The best is over."
All that said, if your local Troop is working, then it's working, right? There are more conservative / Christian alternatives to the Boy Scouts, but I would think the correct individual decision, if you want this kind of activity, is to invest in your best local organization. The national org is mostly only relevant for things like summer camps, and even that you can do without them, if you so choose.
And even then, the camps are run by the local councils, not the national organization, and will generally take troops from outside the council boundaries.
Thanks, I wasn't sure how that worked. The big summer camp we went to back then was about a 5-6-hour drive away, so I figured we were very far outside of local control.
As an Eagle Scout, I'm keenly interested in the current state of the institution. As the parents of a 12-year-old boy, we came down on the "leave" side of the dilemma, but I'm not sure that was the right decision. Commentators on the right have a tendency to exaggerate the extent of woke decline, just as they do with big cities. Lots of people have a fierce, intergenerational loyalty to the Scouts with which I completely sympathize. It's impossible to know from the outside just how bad things have or haven't become. I'm sure results vary greatly by Troop but how does one figure out where the good ones are? And of course there are many fewer choices these days.
What I do believe is that our society needs an institution like the Boy Scouts now more than ever. It was (is?) an institution that let boys mature in an appealing, natural way. Even more importantly, it taught morality and citizenship in a way that neither the church nor the school could quite match. May God bless the efforts of those who haven't yet given up on the organization epitomized by Green Bar Bill.
I get the impression that Scouting has some similarities to the military, where certain families are very committed to it, but other people have increasingly checked out.
What's overlooked about the Boy Scouts collapse is the generational structure. I was a Life Scout, and in turn volunteered as a pack leader for my son's Cub Scout troop right around the time of the Great Awokening. Amidst all the crazy proclamations coming down from the Council and the National bodies, we pulled my son out of the program. I'm not saying that it was all "The Woke's Fault." That's stupid. But Scouting conflicted with piano lessons (which my son liked more), the pack was large but completely disorganized, the local troop was struggling for numbers, and it was another straw on the camel's back. If Scouting was worth it, we could have worked around a difficult schedule, but it wasn't.
But the issue is that now my son is 16. He's the age of the would-be troop leaders. All the potential troop and patrol leaders who would be there to mentor your 11-12 year-old tenderfeet dropped out years ago. A functional troop depends, not just on the adults, but on the older boys bringing the new boys into the fold. The problem isn't just numbers. The real problem is that the living tradition has died and has to be built back from scratch. A 40-year-old man can't substitute in this role. The tenderfeet need Life and Eagle Scouts. To borrow the symbols from the Cubs, they need a pack as much as they need a Cubmaster.
This rings true. One of the things that I remember from Scouting in the 1980s is that the path to Eagle became a matter of a huge amount of documentation and unappealing requirements. I'm sure recent changes have not been for the better. Also it requires a huge investment of time and effort on the part of the parents and a non-trivial financial investment. I figured we could replicate some of the best of it by simply scheduling camping and hiking trips with my son and his friends.
The trouble with the American Boy Scouts goes back to James West prevailing over Ernest Seton in 1915. Seton was the "wild at heart" guy, West was the bureaucrat and lawyer who wanted scouting to turn boys into model citizens. Baden-Powell marketed scouting directly to boys, West marketed scouting to boys' church going parents.
Scouting always had a compliance aspect to it, but American scouting particularly so. The structure was fine in a world where boys lacked it, not so much as boys started experiencing one of the most structured childhoods in history. Compare to the UK where scouting is thriving and you have ~100 000 kids on waiting lists. Despite being coed for a long time, the UK scouting brand is adventure, Bear Grylls was chief scout (largely a ceremonial position) for 15 years.
Join the UK Scouts for adventure (and you may get to hang out with girls), join the American Boys Scouts to work on your badges, stand at attention and learn obedience. Yes, that is a simplification and I don't want to discount the positive experiences many have had with the BSA, but that has been core to its public image for more than 100 years. How much of the Boy Scouts historical success came from the parents, not the boys themselves?
"Part of being a man is about making your mark on the world, not just having the world make its mark on you. It’s about having agency and the ability to, when necessary, defy convention and external pressure and withstand the heat for doing so. Nothing about the Scouts suggests that the organization itself operates on that principle."
Exactly, that has always been one of its selling points. The parts that go against that and are remembered fondly were the remnants of the legacies of people like Baden-Powell and Seton.
Edit: One important caveat wrt to the UK reference. Until very recently they had a good record of managing coed environments in away that it did not end up primarily catering for girls. This is observation does not really apply anymore.
Thanks for the observations.
I was a little harsh on West, he was a thoroughly decent guy but he actually had no interest in the outdoors, understandable as he had polio as a kid. Meanwhile the Boy Scouts grew out of a war that is known for the most dishonorable conduct by the British military in history with war crimes and concentration camps in which 26000 women and children died. Baden-Powell is not directly associated with that but was still an active general in a war where that was policy and at no point in his life ever distanced himself from what happened. So no reason to make West the bad guy.
Nevertheless, the public face of BSA masculinity that West helped build is exactly what you have been criticizing for years now. I am not saying it is better now, just that there is no reason to want to go back to the old version. West, Seton and Baden-Powell actually had quite different visions of what scouting should be, no reason to stick to the Norman Rockwell version.
Thank you Aaron. This piece really struck me in the heart as I became an Eagle Scout nearly 50 years ago. It was a crucial rite of passage in my life. I want to throw something out there I've been considering lately. There is so much emphasis on building and dynamism, but so little thought given to maintenance. It seems we want to completely destroy the old things, then rebuild with little to no consideration for first principles (see Chesterton's Fence). Much like denominational churches, in Boy Scouts, it seems we abandoned first principles, and instead of maintaining the purpose, we tried to over-accommodate the changing culture. Yes, there will always be some adaptation required, but anchoring on first principles is crucial since they tend to transcend time. I often wonder if the modern megachurch represents a return to first principles that the denominational church abandoned and represented a new way for the church to maintain its relevance to culture while returning to its first principles. This is all conjecture on my part and you may disagree, but it is a hypothesis I'm trying to test.
The thing about the San Francisco video having mostly black and white people and very little Asian people is something that isn’t unique to just San Francisco. In the UK, there are over twice as many South Asian people as black people, but if you watch any British television, you would think that black people make up a third of the population while South Asian people are a tiny minority. Black people are just far more represented in the media than other non-white minority groups.
I volunteer for Scouts in Canada where we've been co-ed for 25+ years. IMO, the issue of wokeness is an annoying red herring (annoying because it's shoved at us but can be ignored). Scouts lost their focus. Baden-Powell said we're a school of the outdoors. In whatever part of Scouts I lead (I've worked with the youngest to the oldest), I have an overriding ethic: we must do at least ONE thing per month that will scare your mom. If you focus on the outdoors and on the adventure (school of the outdoors), you will get the tradition and the scouts you seek.
Yes, Scouts also need strong leaders, but what organization doesn't? Without the leadership, who leads and acts as the role model. Given the scandals around Scouts I understand the hesitancy to avoid it. As Aaron has said (and I try to take it to heart), it's my job to build others up. I do my best to take on that mantle of responsibility and try to encourage others to join me.
As a member of BSA in the 2000s I would observe that there was an increasing amount of involved mothers (mine included). Some would call it stereotyping but looking back I see it often led to a lot of unnecessary drama. I would also say that similar to fundamentalist churches there was a strong strain of “all or nothing” involvement demands which pushed out a lot of members who got busier as they moved into high school (myself included).
I was in Cub Scouts in the early 1990’s. This was at a Catholic grade school, which drew from a big city and a wealthy suburb. In my class, there were three Cub Scout dens alone in a pack of 10-12 dens. At the time, it seemed like a thriving Cub Scout pack. I enjoyed and learned a lot during my time in scouts.
One thing that I didn’t think of at the time, but do now, was all but one of the den leaders in my grade were moms. Also, the pack scoutmaster was a deacon/teacher who is in jail today for crimes he did then. Needless to say, of the 20-25 boys in my class who were Cub Scouts, no one became a Boy Scout.
Looking back, it is bittersweet. I did some fun things in scouts, but it felt like we missed out on a lot. I do wonder if more dads were leading it if the results would have been different. The dads did get involved coaching sports. The other extra-curriculars at that time, the school had a group called Room Mothers. Room Fathers would have got weird reactions then. Virtually all of us boys moved onto sports at the school.
Great discussion this week.
On the Boy Scouts, I think your points are all valid. Back in the 1990s, my experiences with Scouts were mixed. One thing I'll say though is that even then, for some reason, my Scoutmaster's overbearing wife was too involved. She came to summer camp, seemingly just to nag us, when I initially thought avoiding that sort of thing was the bare minimum value proposition that Scouts was offering me. Now, I legitimately needed to get my crap together, but to a teenage boy, being informed of this by a respected male authority figure just comes across differently than from a harridan of a woman. Isn't that the whole idea? I wasn't the only member of the troop that thought this.
I also picked up stories of Eagle Scouts doing much cooler things in the old days than we were allowed to. It really felt to me, even in the 90s, that I was coming in even after the good old days were over. And yet the decline in the 30 years since is clearly palpable.
Needless to say, I didn't make Eagle Scout.
Reminds me of the Tony Soprano line, from the pilot: "It's good to be in something from the ground floor, and I came too late for that, I know. But lately I've been getting a feeling that I came at the end. The best is over."
All that said, if your local Troop is working, then it's working, right? There are more conservative / Christian alternatives to the Boy Scouts, but I would think the correct individual decision, if you want this kind of activity, is to invest in your best local organization. The national org is mostly only relevant for things like summer camps, and even that you can do without them, if you so choose.
And even then, the camps are run by the local councils, not the national organization, and will generally take troops from outside the council boundaries.
Thanks, I wasn't sure how that worked. The big summer camp we went to back then was about a 5-6-hour drive away, so I figured we were very far outside of local control.
As an Eagle Scout, I'm keenly interested in the current state of the institution. As the parents of a 12-year-old boy, we came down on the "leave" side of the dilemma, but I'm not sure that was the right decision. Commentators on the right have a tendency to exaggerate the extent of woke decline, just as they do with big cities. Lots of people have a fierce, intergenerational loyalty to the Scouts with which I completely sympathize. It's impossible to know from the outside just how bad things have or haven't become. I'm sure results vary greatly by Troop but how does one figure out where the good ones are? And of course there are many fewer choices these days.
What I do believe is that our society needs an institution like the Boy Scouts now more than ever. It was (is?) an institution that let boys mature in an appealing, natural way. Even more importantly, it taught morality and citizenship in a way that neither the church nor the school could quite match. May God bless the efforts of those who haven't yet given up on the organization epitomized by Green Bar Bill.
I get the impression that Scouting has some similarities to the military, where certain families are very committed to it, but other people have increasingly checked out.
What's overlooked about the Boy Scouts collapse is the generational structure. I was a Life Scout, and in turn volunteered as a pack leader for my son's Cub Scout troop right around the time of the Great Awokening. Amidst all the crazy proclamations coming down from the Council and the National bodies, we pulled my son out of the program. I'm not saying that it was all "The Woke's Fault." That's stupid. But Scouting conflicted with piano lessons (which my son liked more), the pack was large but completely disorganized, the local troop was struggling for numbers, and it was another straw on the camel's back. If Scouting was worth it, we could have worked around a difficult schedule, but it wasn't.
But the issue is that now my son is 16. He's the age of the would-be troop leaders. All the potential troop and patrol leaders who would be there to mentor your 11-12 year-old tenderfeet dropped out years ago. A functional troop depends, not just on the adults, but on the older boys bringing the new boys into the fold. The problem isn't just numbers. The real problem is that the living tradition has died and has to be built back from scratch. A 40-year-old man can't substitute in this role. The tenderfeet need Life and Eagle Scouts. To borrow the symbols from the Cubs, they need a pack as much as they need a Cubmaster.
Great observations.
This rings true. One of the things that I remember from Scouting in the 1980s is that the path to Eagle became a matter of a huge amount of documentation and unappealing requirements. I'm sure recent changes have not been for the better. Also it requires a huge investment of time and effort on the part of the parents and a non-trivial financial investment. I figured we could replicate some of the best of it by simply scheduling camping and hiking trips with my son and his friends.