The death of an insitution

midwestpa24 said:
Have you met many people lately? This statement alone is why a lot of social media exists!
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Fortunately, there aren't many that make it very far into scouting with that approach to life. A lot of what (older, not cub) scouts do is basically a team cooperative game.
 
scouting surveys of parents of members, and potential members- showed parents wanted an organization which catered to and included their daughters, as well as their sons

BSA reached out to GSA and asked if they were interested in integration in some form- they weren’t (as others have noted, programs are fairly different in terms of activities, rabks/awards, Etc)


That’s what I’ve been told drove the change to include girls.

Scout troops can remain all boys if they choose.
Even “Boy Scout” units (11-18) which include girls, keep girls in separate units (Cub Scout dens can be all boys, all girls, or “coed”)
 
Iflydogs said:
We have lost a lot. Men used to care and inculcate values. I feel like a refugee from Atlantis trying to explain how it used to be. It was good.
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It was good for some and awful for others. It’s often easy to see the past through rose colored glasses and the present through doom n gloom. It’s not a new phenomenon either. If you read many of the writings in the 1940s the older generation seen the new generation as self centered, inept compared to themselves and incapable of dealing the crisis of the day. We now call them the greatest generation… for good reason. But even they were the worst to the generation before them.

One day we’re young idealists and the next we yell at the new (and of course lost and worse than all generations before) generation to get off our lawn :)
 
I was a Boy Scout leader for 10 years when my son was a scout. To me, a well-run Troop was a lot more than hiking and camping (although we did a lot of that). Developing young men into leaders was the biggest goal aside from the outdoor skills. Additionally, probably half of the merit badges were about things not outdoorsy (electricity, space exploration, etc) which exposed the scouts to topics that they might not otherwise be exposed. The 20 year mayor of the town I worked in got into local politics because of the Citizenship in the Community merit badge.

As far as the abuse is concerned, it is my understanding that almost all of the allegations are from the 70's and 80's that were brought into focus when several states passed "look-back laws" to prosecute sexual assaults that went unpunished in the past. When I became a leader in the early 2000's it was policy to NEVER be alone with a scout. Two-deep leadership was stressed in our training constantly. IMHO there is nowhere near the risk of abuse in the organization today.

Some kids grow up on a farm or in a rural setting and learning to start a fire or handle a gun safely are things they learn how to do just growing up. Almost all of our scouts came from suburban settings, many without a father in their lives. Most were not into sports. For most, scouting gave them a sense of belonging. I'd like to think we taught them how to be good young men. Watching them graduate from Cub Scouts, to Webelos, to earning their Eagle Scout rank was a blessing.

Maybe the time for Scouting has passed. Maybe the lawsuits will kill it even if that time has not yet come. Regardless, I'll be sad if that happens, because Eagle Scouts like Neil Armstrong show just how beneficial scouting can be.
 
I wanted to be a Cub Scout. But they wouldn't let me unless my mother agreed to be a den mother......or whatever you call that. She couldn't......as she traveled the world with my father for View-Master.
 
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