Knot Tying and the Aims of Scouting

[scoutingagain 20]

My two cents.

 

As a youth I participated in both Scouts and Little League. I spent hours and hours trying to perfect the skill of throwing a round sphere approx. 2.5" to 3" in diameter through an imaginary box 17 inches wide and the length of an average 11-12 year olds distance between their shoulders and knees. I never was very good at this skill so I was relegated to playing third base, because I could at least throw the sphere fast enough in the general direction of 1st base where I could get an opposing player out if I managed to get my hands on the sphere if it was hit in my direction. I got fairly good at this skill, however have not used these skill for any practical reason in say 30 to 40 years.

 

As a recreational sailer, camper, homeowner, gardner, etc. I use the knot tying skills I learned in scouting at least on a monthly basis if not weekly.

 

SA

[Kudu 186]

Scouting is a game! No Little League executives ever suggest that the baseball skills Scoutingagain practiced so diligently should be replaced with more "practical" skills for the 21st century such as Leadership Theory and "Making Ethical Choices."

 

Rather than hitting a ball with a stick, or moving a ball down a field with your feet, Scouting is based on "hands-on" skills such as knot-tying, fire building, cooking, following a trail, etc, with which humans interacted with the Outdoors and each other ("Citizenship") during their entire evolution, and which in turn caused the human brain to develop the way that it did.

 

In Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv writes:

 

"Frank Wilson, professor of neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is an expert on the co-evolution of the hominid hand and brain; in The Hand he contends that one could not have evolved to its current sophistication without the other. He says, 'We've been sold a bill of goods--especially parents--about how valuable computer-based experience is. We are creatures identified by what we do with our hands.' Much of our learning comes from doing, from making, from feeling with our hands; and though many would like to believe otherwise, the world is not entirely available from a keyboard. As Wilson sees it, we're cutting off our hands to spite our brains. Instructors in medical schools find it increasingly difficult to teach how the heart works as a pump, he says, 'because these students have so little real-world experience: they've never siphoned anything, never fixed a car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up a garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through machines. These young people are smart, they grew up with computers, they were supposed to be superior--but now we know that something's missing'."

 

Also check out The Order of Nature: Considered in Reference to the Claims of Revelation by the Rev. Baden Powell, M.A.

 

http://inquiry.net/ideals/order_nature/index.htm

 

Kudu