Re: What Are We Teaching & Scout Spirit (Part I)

Dear Friends,
My job as a Scouter has always been to (in the words of Baden-Powel) "Look
for the good in boys." For seven years, I was an adult leader is what was
then known as an urban unit. My Scouts were generally pretty good kids who
had to deal on a daily basis with drugs, gangs, and other forms of violence.
Our troop didn't have a very good record of keeping these boys in the
program very long (we averaged about 18 months per boy), but I feel sure
that what little exposure they had to Scouting kept them moving in the right
direction.

One thing I could never get over when I was with that troop was how easily
others would give up on a boy. Parents, other leaders, and even my friends
would tell me that this or that boy was unreachable. I could never give up
on any of them. Usually, they would give up on themselves long before I was
ready to give up. In seven years I guess there must have been about sixty to
seventy boys registered to that troop. We had one earn Eagle Scout. Three
earned Life, four earned Star, four earned First Class, two earned Second
Class, eight earned Tenderfoot, and about twenty-five earned Scout. The rest
never quite made it to any rank before dropping out. I have never viewed it
as a failed unit simply because as far as I am aware, none of those young
men are in prison, none of them died of drug abuse or in some gang fight,
and only one of them ever did any time in a juvenile detention center.

I could point to the Scout Oath and Scout Law and say that those boys
benefitted from what they learned from me, but I would be wrong. As with any
kid, they only learned what they wanted to learn. I hope and pray that the
example I set was good enough to show them that there is more to life than
violence and crime. Most of them weren't around long enough to have been
deeply effected by the Scout Oath and Law. More likely, they were effected
by the knowledge that there was at least one or two adults not related to
them who cared about what happened to them.

So, what are WE teaching children today? I don't know what the schools are
teaching, but I know that there are several men out there who's life is a
little better today because I was willing to try to find some good in them.
When I start to become cynical like the media or those groups that blame
everything on television and rock lyrics, I just do a little math. I look at
what I managed to accomplish in seven years with a group of kids that would
have been labelled "gangstas" and I multiply it by a couple million. Every
Scouter in every unit for the last eighty-eight years has had roughly the
same effect on roughly the same number of kids. Sometime we fail to reach a
boy before other influences take hold, but mostly we are successful. And
that's what keep me looking for the good in ALL kids!

YIS
Anthony J. Mako, ajmako@apk.net
Scoutmaster, Troop 381
http://members.aol.com/Scouts381/
"Home of the Unofficial Boy Scout Desktop Theme!"
Great Trail Council - Akron, Ohio
"I used to be an Eagle (C-7-97), but I'll always be an Eagle (1981)"

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