THE BOY SCOUT INFLUENCE
What magic there is in the name of Scout! It calls up before the mind’s
eye the vision of a buckskin-clad pioneer, inured to the hardships of
the trail and endowed with the virtues of strength, fortitude, clear
thinking, and courage which boys admire so much; one whose everyday
life is made up of a series of thrilling adventures and hairbreadth
escapes. Is it to be wondered at that the hero-worshiping boy, still in
the semi-savage state, should desire to emulate such a romantic figure
in our national life?
The organization known as the Boy Scouts of America is a national
movement, rather than an organization, whose primary object is
character-building. It is non-sectarian and non-military. It furnishes
the adolescent boy with facilities for the expression of his growing
body, mind, and soul and inspires the virtues of patriotism, chivalry,
honor, courtesy, loyalty, self-respect, faithfulness, cheerfulness,
thoughtfulness, and obedience.
There are three classes of Scouts; the tenderfoot, the second-class
Scout and the First-class Scout, advancement being made according to
the proficiency shown by examination. Suitable badges awarded for each
class are prized as great honors and furnish the incentive to further
progress in Scoutcraft. The reader is referred to the official handbook
of the organization for a detailed statement of the many subjects
included in their curriculum. These subjects cover practically the
entire range of an adolescent’s interests and activities apart from
the home, the school, and the church.
Not the least important among the many requirements of the scout is the
good turn or kindness which he must do for someone every day without
financial reward. The performance of the daily good turn develops
courtesy, gallantry and social consciousness and fixes in his mind a
realization of the fact that he is one of the threads in the social
fabric of humanity. The boy-training of today, whether parental or
organizational, should emphasize the importance of service to others,
and the boy in whom this altruistic idea is grounded will not give his
parents great cause for worry. If this organization had no requirement
other than the daily good turn, that fact alone would be sufficient
excuse for its existence. These samples of good turns, taken from
the records of a Scout troop, are as varied as the natures and
opportunities of the boys themselves and afford an interesting study in
adolescent psychology:
1. I helped a blind man ’cross the street.
2. A steam roller was passing and frightened a horse, I held the horse
until the roller went by.
3. Fed a starving cat.
4. I gave a dime to a orfun asilam.
5. Picked up a broken bottle from the road so it wouldn’t cut a horse’s
foot or an automobile tire.
6. Gave a lady my seat in a street car.
7. I helped my mother clean out the garret.
8. I gave a nickel to a poor lame hobo.
9. I loaned your chauffeur a dime when he was broke.
10. I picked up a girl’s slate in school when she dropped it and
sharpened her pencil.
11. Helped an old lady with a lot of bundles get on a street car.
12. Put out a fire in the weeds in a lot.
13. Ran after a girl’s hat which blew off and brought it back to her.
14. A team hitched to an ice wagon was walking down the street and I
climbed in the back way and stopped them and drove them to the police
station. Just then the driver came running up for his team and cussed
me for driving them off, when I was only doing him a good turn.
15. I found a borde in the street with a nail stickken up and I threw
it in a vacunt lot and pushed the nail in the ground.
16. I uncanned a dog (i. e., removed can from dog’s tail).
17. I build a bird house in my back yard.
18. I licked a big boy for licking a little boy.
19. I run errands for my mother when I ot to have bin playin ball.
20. Took some pervisions to a pore fambly near the gas wurks.
21. Helped a boy with his arithmetic lessons.
22. Showed a man where Washington street was.
23. I stopped two kids from fighting.
24. When my mother was sick, I worked all day helping her on Sattiday.
25. I went and staid with a sick boy and cheered him up.
26. I found a dog which was lost and I ast Scotty who belonged to the
dog and he sed he thot Mr. Edwards up the street, so I took the dog
back to Mr. Edwards and he sed thank you and offured me a quarter and I
sed Boy Scouts do not take tips.
27. I swore off smokin cigerets.
28. I turned in my wages to my mother.
29. I cleaned up the alley back of the house.
30. I helped a little girl pick up a bag of potatoes when the bag
busted and made another kid quit laffing at her.
31. I went for a can of beer for Mrs. Schwartzberger.
It is evident that the last good turn was performed by a slum boy who
had recently joined the troop.
It requires no student of psychology to recognize the different
developments of moral concepts shown in these replies. Some betray the
first signs of the dawning of moral consciousness, while others show a
keen appreciation of altruistic ideals, the result of ennobling home
influence and proper training.
The performance of the daily good turn develops the faculty for the
formulation of ideals. A new relationship to duty is thus fixed and
the boy’s moral nature is builded, slowly but surely, until one can
visualize the completed character of the future. Of all this, the boy
himself is wholly unconscious.
The boy knows little, if anything, of the principles or purposes of the
Boy Scouts before he becomes a member. For that matter, the average
parent has made no great effort to inform himself on the objects, scope
and workings of the organization, as too frequently he assumes it to be
a method devised for his son’s amusement, which will relieve the parent
of the duty of personal supervision while the boy is so occupied. He
regards it as a species of boy entertainment, wholly disassociated from
its educational and ethical import.
The youth knows only two things about Boy Scouts, which he has learned
from observation--that they wear uniforms and go on hikes. Both of
these make a powerful appeal to his imagination and interest. The
uniform and the parade satisfy the spectacular and dramatic needs of
his nature and the hikes gratify his savage and atavistic tendencies
which prompt him to seek the wilds and live temporarily as did his
remote ancestor--the primeval man. He joins the organization to satisfy
these primitive desires and thus effects a return to the simple life,
which furnishes, to the city youth especially, an antidote for the
injury wrought by our increasingly complex civilization and hurried
methods of living.
He does not dream nor care that the fundamental purpose of the
organization is character-building; indeed, if he were informed of this
fact, his interest would probably wane. He dislikes character-building
in the abstract, but is intensely interested in concrete scout
activities which silently and inevitably produce character.
The system of teaching a boy ethics and morals by lecturing him or by
feeding him with tracts which hold up to view the abstract beauties of
morality has long since been thrown into the discard as archaic and
useless. It is one of the relics of unscientific training--Puritanical,
wasteful, inefficient. The keen discernment of the boy’s mind sees the
dry bones of such methods. The boy is red-blooded and alive and wants
live methods. Some of our forefathers truly believed they had found
the secret of boy-training in the cultivation in him of a sense of
self-abasement, personal unworthiness, and insignificance which they
fostered by requiring the boy to sing hymns which likened him to a poor
worm groveling in the dust. I have never yet met a boy who admitted his
relationship to the worm--apart from his compulsory expression of the
sentiment in song.
The Scout idea is to get back to elemental things by contact with the
earth, the ozone of the open, the wild life of the forest and stream.
These things not only make him a strong, healthy animal, but teach him
the joy of living and how to live. They train the boy to “Be Prepared”
for all the various contingencies of life and thus exemplify the motto
of the organization.
Scout camps and hikes are a school for training the imagination in the
legends of the woods and of animal life, which are inspired by the
mystery of the camp fire and the glorious solitude of the starry night,
faintly stirred by the wind in the tree tops. The gleam of wavering
lights from the camp fire transforms the faces of the circling scouts
into animated sprites. Ascending flames split the darkness into dancing
shadows which people the surrounding woods with living myths and
fables. A kaleidoscopic riot of color mounts upward, painting luminous
images on the retina as it sketches in chromatic outline the heroes of
fantasy. It is such things which inspire the poetry of life. Nothing
furnishes such stimulus to the imagination as the camp fire. It calls
into play all the mystery and mysticism of the human mind; it discovers
the hidden wellsprings of romance, legend and adventure; it inspires
the art of the story-teller as nothing else can do and furnishes a
perfect stage setting for the dramatic tale which unobtrusively carries
its own moral. It is here that the _raconteur_ can weave his tale from
the warp of adventure and the woof of romance until the resulting
mantle of heroism fits every boyish auditor. Deeds of daylight loom
large with valor against the background of night. The potent influence
of such surroundings for driving home lasting impressions on the
imaginative and sensitive mind of youth has never been equaled.
Around the nightly camp-fire “council” are recounted the events of the
day; awards for merit are given; songs breathing the martial spirit
which boys love so well are sung; the Scout Master’s story of heroism
and adventure is heard with eager ears and is followed invariably by
frank comments indicating the manner of its reception; finally a drowsy
song like “My Old Kentucky Home,” reflecting the somnolent spirit of
the lengthening hours, brings the “council” to a close; soon the soft
tones of “taps” are heard droning from the bugle and, rolled in their
blankets, the little tourists quickly journey to slumberland.
Scout associations foster _esprit de corps_ and team work, as well as
a recognition of relative rights and duties which is in the highest
degree cultural. The appreciation of property rights is cultivated to
such an extent that a scout will not willfully damage the property of
another. Not the least beneficent influence exerted by the organization
is its inculcation of obedience, discipline, loyalty, truthfulness,
chivalry, courtesy, respect for women, helpfulness to others,
patriotism, and manliness. These qualities are unconsciously and
unobtrusively impressed on his plastic character during the formative
age until they become a component part of it. A scout is taught that he
is always “on honor,” and that his word is accepted unreservedly, as
the truth. The youth feels more needs than the home, school, and church
can supply--the need for companionship, play, sports, adventure, and
romance. His gregarious and social instincts must be fed by association
with those of his own age; his love of adventure and physical
expression must be gratified by the clean activities of the forest,
the stream, the ball field; his love of romance needs find expression
in the extraordinary experiences of woodcraft, pathfinding and cave
exploration; and his love of play must be satiated by rough sports,
games, and athletics through which he attains his physical, mental, and
ethical development. It is an application of Froebel’s epoch-making
theory of training and developing boys by means of play. It is the
utilization of his “wild period” by systematic direction and oversight
for the upbuilding of character and manhood.
The Scout movement is playing a huge joke on the boy in supplying him,
under the guise of fun, play, sport, and adventure with work, study,
and developmental activities whose real import is the upbuilding of
character, mind, and body; but this ulterior motive is never suspected
by the boy until after these results have been accomplished. If the
instinctive tendencies to companionship with those of his own age are
not normally gratified by membership in a supervised gang they will
find expression in his association with an unsupervised gang with the
evil results which inevitably flow from such association. The Boy Scout
organization is the ideal gang because it satisfies his natural desires
for gangdom while it is silently and surely building both body and
character.
“Of all present-day organizations for the improvement and happiness
of normal boyhood,” Dr. G. S. Hall has written, “the institution
of the Boy Scouts is built at once on the soundest psychology and
the shrewdest insight into boy-nature. The Scout Patrol is simply
a boy’s gang, systematized, overseen, affiliated with other like
bodies, made efficient and interesting, as boys alone could never
make it, and yet everywhere, from top to bottom, essentially a gang.
Other organizations have adopted gang features. Others have built
themselves around various gang elements. The Boy Scout Patrol alone
is the gang. The whole Boy Scout movement is a shrewd and highly
successful attempt to take the natural, instinctive, spontaneous boys’
society, to add nothing to what is already there, but deliberately to
guide the boy into getting completely just that for which he blindly
gropes. The obvious answer to the whole gang problem, therefore, is
this: Turn your gang into a Boy Scout Patrol.” A troop of Scouts is
only a denatured gang whose activities have been changed from vicious
to character-building tendencies, a result which is accomplished by
the systematic, helpful, and inspirational guidance of the Scout
Master along the lines of the Scout curriculum. The potent influence
of activities disguised as play, which produce physical and moral
betterment, is nowhere more apparent than in this organization. The
things for which the unsupervised gang was blindly seeking have been
completely furnished by the supervised Scout Patrol. Judge Edward
Porterfield of the Kansas City Juvenile Court paid this tremendous
tribute to the influence of the Boy Scouts: “If every boy in the city
would join, the gangs would disappear, the juvenile court would soon
be a stranger to the youth, and we would rear a generation of men
that would not require much police protection. I have never had a
boy scout in my court and there are twelve hundred of them in Kansas
City.” President-emeritus Charles W. Eliot of Harvard stated in a
recent address: “I feel sure that nothing but good will come from the
educational or training qualities of the Boy Scout movement as a whole.
It is setting an example that our whole public-school system ought to
follow.”
The scheme supplies the companionship of those of his own age and
the opportunity, under competent supervision, for the exercise of
physical, mental, and manual activities which make for his betterment.
Its effectiveness lies in the universality of its appeal; it touches
the life of every boy regardless of social status or religious
affiliations; it gets a moral grip on boys of every phase of
temperamental condition; and its moral virus gets under a boy’s hide
like a hypodermic injection.
The universality of its appeal to boyhood is shown by its membership
which is recruited from all ranks of society--from the slum to the
palace. It touches the boy on every side of his manifold interests.
The best proof that the organization is founded on correct psychologic
principles is its popularity with the boys themselves and the splendid
caliber of the boys who are graduated from it. Its strong appeal is
grounded in its harmony with boy-nature. Without understanding his
mental processes or the psychology of his preferences, the boy knows
what he likes and what he dislikes. He loves the Boy Scouts because it
is an organization which satisfies the cravings of his boy heart. One
Scout expressed the thought in these words, “Scouts are always doin’
things and they have the most fun.” Always doin’ things! What a world
of psychological truth is crystallized in this youthful statement! It
drops the plummet in the wellsprings of truth. Continuous action is
the key to his evolution and by it the budding boy blossoms into the
mature man. In a word, the entire Scout plan consists of crowding the
boy’s life so full of agreeable activities of useful and ethical import
that he has no time for noxious things. The busy boy is the best boy.
The Scout influence is one of the most powerful factors for good in the
boy’s life and is the most potent supplemental agency which has yet
been devised for adolescent development.
We hear much, in these latter days, of business and industrial
efficiency. Experts in this line are able to systematize a business,
a railroad, or a factory so that a given amount of labor will produce
a maximum of results. Even such unskilled labor as shoveling is
susceptible of scientific improvement. An efficiency expert employed by
a great corporation decreased the number of movements of ore shovelers
one-half, with a corresponding increase in tonnage of ore handled, and
without an increase in the expenditure of physical energy.
It is equally important that efficiency methods should be employed in
the training of boys. Scientific methods applied to boy-culture will
increase the quality of the output as well as make the work easier for
the boy and the parent. The Boy Scout movement is an efficiency method
of scientific boy-training in mass. It supplements perfectly the work
of the home, the school, the church. It furnishes a kind of training
which none of these supplies and in making this statement I do not
undervalue the inestimable influence of these institutions on the life
of the boy today.
The home is the primary and most important agency for the boy’s general
training, the school for mental development, and the church for moral
and religious culture; but in the wide field of boy-nature not reached
by these agencies the Boy Scout organization directs his development
from the child into the man.
The organization has passed the experimental stage and is now on
the highway of proved success. Thousands of boys are clamoring for
admission which must be denied until Scout Masters can be enlisted and
trained to take charge of troops. Here is a wonderful field for social
service, ripe for harvest, awaiting the man who loves boys and who
recognizes his duty in having some part in raising the standard of our
future citizenship.