Your boy and his training

by Edwin Seward Puller

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.