The Boy Scouts of America teaches young men skills, values, and life lessons through leadership, cooperation, and community service. Scouts learn about wilderness survival, camping, and other useful skills through earning merit badges. These lessons can benefit them throughout their lives.
The Boy Scouts of America is an organization that strives to give young men the knowledge, skills, and life lessons that will help them mature and succeed as adults. The organization offers children a number of benefits, including friendship, education, leadership opportunities and the chance to grow and thrive in a healthy and rewarding environment. Scouting developed during the early 1900s when men such as Robert Baden-Powell in England and William Boyce and Ernest Thompson Seton in the United States began organizing groups of boys and teaching them outdoor skills, environmentalism and civic responsibility. Since then, scouting organizations have helped millions of kids around the world. While the term “boy scout” often refers to the Boy Scouts of America, it could also be used to refer to scouting organizations in other countries, which typically offer the same types of benefits.
Leadership and cooperation
A boy who participates in scouting can expect to have a lot of fun, work hard, learn a lot and grow both physically and mentally. Boy Scouts emphasize both leadership and cooperation. Each local scouting party, or reconnaissance troop, is further broken up into smaller groups called patrols. Each patrol works as a team, sometimes competing with other patrols and sometimes working alongside them. These basic lessons in leadership and cooperation can prove useful later in life and can translate directly to working with neighbors and dealing with business associates.
Values taught
Boy Scouts also emphasize good living and a positive attitude. This emphasis can be seen in the Scout Oath, the Scout Law, and the Scout Slogan, which are often recited by Scouts. The Scout Oath, or Scout Promise, states: “On my honour, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; help other people at all times; to keep me physically strong, mentally alert, and morally upright.” There are 12 values stated in the Scout Act: “A Scout is reliable, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, courageous, clean and reverent.” The Scouts slogan is: “Make a good turn every day”.
These moral values are taught to Scouts and practiced in community service projects. Scouts are often involved with churches and various community organizations in efforts to help the homeless, clean up parks and public areas, visit gated neighborhoods, encourage public safety, and intervene wherever necessary to benefit the community. Every Boy Scout is required to carry out a community service project in order to reach the highest rank, which is that of Eagle Scout.
Knowledge and skills
Boy Scouts also offer its members a wide range of knowledge and useful skills, in areas such as wilderness survival, camping, fishing, photography and science. As Scouts learn about these topics and acquire new skills, they can earn merit badges to showcase the topics they learned about. Merit badges are available in dozens of subjects in a wide variety of fields, such as citizenship in the nation, astronomy, soil and water conservation, hiking, and genealogy. By earning merit badges, Scouts have the opportunity to learn information that might be useful and to develop skills, as well as the accompanying confidence, that can serve them throughout their lives.
Lessons for life
Time spent in the Boy Scouts benefits a boy in many ways. The friends he makes, the work ethic and morals he develops, the community service he practices, and the knowledge and skills he acquires can help him throughout his life. Even long after his days in the Boy Scouts are over, a man can still remember that he should be courteous and kind and put in a good turn every day.
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