Grim's Hall

The Boy Scouts & the Gentleman

Commenter Ron Fox wrote an extensive piece on the Boy Scouts on one of the posts below. I thought it deserved a place on the full page:

As I've commented before, I've been a Scout leader the last 12 years. I've had a lot of experience observing boys and their behavior, and observing their mothers and their interaction with their mothers. Boys are loud, impulsive, physical, and difficult to control, especially if you are not 6' 2" and over 250 pounds with a voice that carries though a brick wall. The Scouting program deals with this by 1) making sure the boys have plenty of physical activity, 2) having them learn mostly by doing, not by listening or watching, 3) using other boys that the Scouts themselves elected as leaders, and 4) tolerating a certain level of disorder and mistakes.

There are a significant number of mothers who don't like this. Fathers tend to mostly go along with the "boys will be boys" philosophy, but the mothers want boys to be nice and quiet, pay attention, and not take physical risks. Just like they were when they were kids. I have had a lot of mothers question my philosophy. When we take the kids rock climbing, which I describe to the parents as "We're going to take your kids, tie them to ropes, and hang them 70 feet in the air over rocks", the mothers often don't even want to hear us describe it, never mind consider joining us. Just as well, since many of them are far too heavy and out of shape to be able to climb up to the top of the cliffs (although our Committee Chair is a notable exception). And we actually have had parents hold their kids out of our trips because it sounded too dangerous to them - we just had one kid who had to stay home from our rafting trip because Mom somehow divined that the currents in the river (that are 6 hours away by car and that I'll bet she's never seen in her life) would be too strong. Nevermind that the whole rest of the Troop went, and that we've been going up there for 3 years; we obviously don't know what we're talking about. Kids like that will quit the program out of shame.

Now, there are numerous mothers who, willingly or not, recognize that their sons have to be boys in order to become men. But there's a lot who don't. They are smothering their kids. They start literally screaming at me when I let the kids play dodgeball and one gets smacked by a ball thrown by a boy a foot taller and 50 pounds heavier than he is. They don't realize that when the kid realizes that he didn't die, he becomes a little braver. They hold him close instead of shoving him out the door, and then wonder why he calls home crying homesick from summer camp his 4th year at camp, when he's 14 or 15.

And should their son insist on being a boy, they drug it out of him, often because the school finds boys harder to control than girls and use drugs to turn the boys into girls. The concept that perhaps they should adapt their teaching methods to fit the pupils, instead of vice versa, seems to escape them.

That captures a great deal of what is wrong with modern education. I would like to see a method of education that teaches boys in just that fashion: and one that returns to the classical notion of education. It should focus on reading the great works in their original languages, which means learning a fair amount of Greek, Latin, and French as well as Early Modern English. It should involve a heavy does of physical education, including boxing, riflemanship, ropework, and other practical skills according to the boys' interest.

It should involve mathematics heavily, and history taught in three cycles from childhood through the end of high school: a short first cycle to give children a "root" of where they are in the world; a second, long cycle, from third grade until the end of eight grade, that starts with the founding of civilization and goes through American history, but with time for frequent looks back over the years at how civilization carried forward traditions and ideas from the earlier periods, or lost and recovered them. Then a fourth cycle in high school, which begins again with Ancient History and Ancient Greece for the first year; Ancient Rome and the Medieval period for the second year; the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period in the third year; and the fourth year, modern history and American history. The third cycle would be more in-depth and scholarly than the previous two.

A classical education of that sort would be the best preparation I can imagine for the modern world. That it was also the best possible preparation for all previous worlds is not an accident.