Boy Scouts

The Boy Scouts began in 1908 was in Britain, where Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, a hero of the Boer Wars, founded the Boy Scouts. It reflected the spirit of scientific efficiency promoted by the Progressive Movement. The Boy Scouts of America was founded in 1910, as a copy of the British model.

Today the Scout Movement is the largest voluntary youth group in the world. Its membership exceeds 28 million, counting boys and girls. Most (95 of 155 National Scout Organizations) are now mixed at at least some ages.

Baden-Powell

Baden-Powell wrote in a pamphlet "Scouting & Christianity" (1917): "Scouting is nothing less than applied Christianity." Since then, various Scouting Organizations have been founded for members of other religions, or which are not specific to any religion.

In designing the Scouting program, Baden-Powell drew ideas from the Japanese warrior's code or "bushido", on the Victorian "ragged schools" movement, and the educational methods of Montessori. His Scouting for Boys (1st ed. 1908) synthesizes Zulu war-cry and Sherlock Holmes; it is full of practical tips on health and hygiene and object lessons in woodcraft. Alongside practical instructions on how to light fires, build a boat, or stalk wild animals, it includes sections on chivalry, self-discipline, self-improvement, and citizenship. The book overflows with Baden-Powell's philosophy of life, one that replaces self with service, puts country before the individual, and duty above all.

It is the original blueprint and inspiration for the Boy Scout Movement, and as a best-seller in the British Empire was second in its day only to the Bible.

China

The Kuomintang party (or KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek) used scouring in the Nanjing decade (1927-37) to promote civic duty and citizenship. The KMT sought to modernize China and build a base of dedicated citizens throughout the large nation. The obstacle was traditionalism in the villages, and it hoped scouting could help transform the younger generation, creating a cadre of citizens committed to serving the nation and party. Throughout this period, Boy Scout citizenship training combined moral cultivation, political indoctrination, and military drills, with lessons in etiquette, hygiene, and practical skills. These multiple dimensions of civic training were, however, fraught with fundamental internal tensions. For example, scouts were taught forms of etiquette characteristic of urban elite society while also learning practical skills needed by modernizing youth such as cooking, cleaning, and washing. Scouting also presented contradictory visions of the social order. Some lessons portrayed society as the product of the autonomous actions of its members, who were differentiated by their distinctive contributions. Other lessons characterized society as a homogeneous mass organized into ordered ranks by the authority of the KMT. The war with Janan (1937) and the subsequent civil war disrupted scouting; when the Communists came to power in 1949 they closed the movement down and used Red Guards to create young obedient Communist fanatics.

Japan

In the 1910s and 1920s, the Osaka Boy Scouts were established in Osaka, Japan, from an American Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), which had close contacts with the Boy Scouts of America. The acceptance and subsequent popularity of the Boy Scouts reflected widespread Americanization of Japanese city life, although the Japanese domesticated American Boy Scouting and tried to remake it as a Japanese entity. The Boy Scouts was a part of the Progressive movement that represented various efforts responding to social problems in both Japan and the United States. It was actually included in transpacific Progressivism. In the 1930s the voluntary Boy Scout organization was forced to transform itself into a militaristic association, starting with an incident at the Osaka Boy Scouts. Exchanges with the BSA eventually stopped, yet transpacific Japanese interest in the BSA continued. Observing the US treatment of minorities in a domestic colonial situation (blacks in the South) the Boy Scouts came to be utilized as a cultural agent for supporting the Japanese empire in Eastern Asia and the South Sea Islands. In this sense, the Boy Scouts was a transpacific social movement, too.

Further reading

• Baden-Powell, R.S.S. Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship (1908), excerpt and text search
• Springhall, John. Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements 1883-1940 (1977), esp, 53-70.

see also

• Boy Scouts of America