The girl scouts are modernizing to "become more relevant" should the BSA take some notes here?

[Nike 94]

As far as I'm concerned, Girl Scouts has been going south since they ditched the Hospitality badge. (Yes, I have mine. EVERY girl in my mother's troop earned it. You couldn't escape without one.)

 

I believe that firstly Girl Scouts were seduced by the Women's Libbers and the SuperWoman syndrome of the early eighties (Anyone remember the Enjolie commercials? No, not the third line.) And, in trying to expose girls to so many male dominated avocations and vocations, they forgot that girls are girls. They also began to wander away from an outdoor program at the summer camps in my area of Virginia. I went to equestrian or sailing camp for four summers as well as went on the quarterly spelunking trips. They don't do that stuff anymore.

 

Secondly: Girl Scouts has become more and more liberal as the generation before mine has risen through the ranks. Yes, be open and available, but there have to be some hard and fast values at the bottom. Once we throw out some common core beliefs, we might as well just be a cookie shilling operation, which is exactly how many leaders in my council felt when cookie money went to finance a huge dining/conference facility at the main camp, which troops could not use, and a huge elaborate new campus for the office, which couldn't find an elephant in the living room nor would they bother to look.

 

Thirdly: No girl I ever met ever liked the uniform. It was way too green when I was a Cadette and Senior. No one even owned one.

 

Fourthly: What are we as a society doing to girls these days in the first place that anyone thinks Scouting can completely ameliorate? Little girls and young teens are overly sexualized, overly pressured to acheive academically and in arts or sports, and simply not allowed to mature phsyically, socially, and mentally at a natural rate. When my mother finally quit after twenty years as a leader, families, and girls had changed to such a point she felt like she was often doing social work triage in a very middle class, not too diverse neighborhood.

 

My solution is back to basics of outdoor skills, life skills, community service, patriotism, and religious duty. Career exploration and social consciousness can wait a while. If more girls were calmly grounded in these things in the elementary grades, maybe middle and high school would be a little easier.

 

Scouts, both for boys and girls, needs to be an island of sanity and surety and security in a frantic and increasingly base world. If this isn't attractive to as many people as it used to be, it's better to accept it, still reach out, and well serve the children and families still coming.