With a carefully-laid programme of such items the scouts' training can be carried out indefinitely in an interesting way, and on lines that will be of use to them in their future career.
I even advocate taking the boys to a theatre to see something really good, as a very great inducement to them to save the money necessary to pay for their seats. It can be made the first step towards thrift.
METHOD OF INSTRUCTION.
The way to teach a language is not to bore your pupil at first with the dry bones of elementary grammar, but to plunge into fairly deep water with phrases and conversation; the grammar will then quickly follow of itself.
So also with most other subjects of instruction, including scouting. For instance, take tracking. After preparing the boys' minds with a few good tracking yarns and showing a few actual tracks and their meaning, don't wait till they get bored in trying to learn the elementary details, but take them for a real piece of practical tracking. After they have found out for themselves how weak they are at it, give them further "sips" of the elementary part.
IMAGINATION.
Boys are full of romance, and they love "make-believe" to a greater extent than they like to show.
All you have to do is to play up to this and to give rein to your imagination to meet their requirements. But you have to treat with all seriousness the many tickling incidents that will arise: the moment you laugh at a situation the boys are quick to feel that it is all a farce, and to lose faith in it forthwith and for ever.
For instance, in instructing a patrol to make the call of its tutelary animal (page 355), the situation borders on the ridiculous, but if the instructor remains perfectly serious the boys work at it with the idea that it is "business"—and once accomplished the call becomes a fetish for esprit de corps among the members of the patrol.
Bacon said that play-acting was one of the best means of educating children, and one can quite believe him.