Guilty.

[Oak Tree 15]

I would love to see those studies. But I suspect you may be right about the lack of support. God forbid that someone's sacred ox gets gored. Much better to let people make anecdotal arguments in favor of their favorite program element.

 

There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be asked. It would be very insightful to give a detailed questionaire to a few hundred units and see what kind of response you get. One problem would be that units that do things wrong tend to fail, so it might be hard to get representative results. But I'd love to see if there's any correlation with where/when den meet, how long pack meetings are, when advancement ceremonies are held, whether the unit wears a full uniform, how the committee/den leaders meet, how often the unit goes camping (both packs and troops), etc.

 

It's always hard to separate correlation and causation, too. I've seen several BSA studies that show that Scouts do well in society. But I've generally thought that it could be that good families tend to put their kids in Scouts. Hard to tell.

 

I'd predict that you'd see strong correlation with some of the district demographics. The actions of the DE may also have a big effect. If he puts little effort in, or is generally not very good at his job, there would be a noticeable effect. At the unit level, I think that enthusiasm of the leadership, and a reasonable willingness to compromise (and not do so many of the wacky things we read about on this forum) would be key indicators.

 

I think good units tend to get their leaders trained, but I'm not as convinced that training creates good leaders. Good strong units tend to make their quality numbers, but fudging to make the numbers doesn't make you a quality organization.

 

I too applaud any unit that resists efforts to misrepresent their actual state. I don't mind a few hangers-on, if they want to be there, but there's no reason to push to include anyone who doesn't want to be there, or to tweak the advancement dates. I understand Eamonn's temptation, and he is absolved from guilt as far as I'm concerned, but it cannot be a healthy thing for an organization to encourage this type of behavior. And the whole system is set up that way right now.

 

Oak Tree