There are many of parents who are good at running activity programs for youth but there aren’t many parents who are good at running a youth leadership training program. The article rightly points out that the Eagle Scout project, which is supposed to be a leadership capstone project has devolved into learning how to navigate bureaucracy.
The BSA settlement over sexual abuse allocations was $2.46B for claims going back to the 1970s. No matter how good the program to prevent abuse today, this generation of controls will be judged against the standards of 2070s. This makes any asset heavy youth program financially untenable.
Personally I think scouting, done right, is a beautiful thing but I don’t see how the program survives or how any similar volunteer program would she able to survive long term.
As a scoutmaster you have probably noticed the problems go much deeper:
1) The BSA national organization sized itself in the 1970s based on the idea that membership would continue to increase forever. The national organization is grossly oversized relative to the needs of the troops. The result is that the national organizations needs are at odds with the troops needs. The national organization is primarily focused on funding itself, including its debt, which creates a net burden for troops.
2) This net burden manifests itself in multiple ways at the troop level including using troops for fund raising efforts for the national organization where little if any of the funds make it back to the troop, increasingly irrelevant mandatory merit badge requirements to appease national donors who want to make their mark (reducing scout choices) and increasingly expensive costs for camps and equipment.
3) Lack of a solid development program for Scoutmasters. Few men in corporate America truly know how to manage or lead anymore. This rot started in the 1970s when computer programs replaced middle management and operations was largely outsourced. Outdoor skills have eroded as the population became more urbanized. Scoutmasters can’t teach what they don’t know and the national organization hasn’t filled that gap. For example compare BSA with NOLS for quality of their skills training.
4) Without a strong selection and development program for scoutmasters there is no prestige. Corporate America’s doesn’t see it as a place to develop leadership from but a distraction. That means that the people the scouting organization can draw from are the very, very good and the very, very bad.
5) Sexual abuse is a significant problem for any youth development organization and that fact was ignored by the BSA for way too long. The majority of perpetrators are men. As an organization with a declining pool of volunteers to draw adult leadership from the ratio of abusers who volunteer is going to be uncomfortably high. Courts and the court of public opinion have shown that there is no limit to the liability for this type of behavior. This is a strong signal that American’s simply do not want youth programs where this kind of thing can happen.
6) Being an adult leader of a youth organization comes with breathtakingly high amount of personal liability. Simply moving a car full of youth from one place to another risks financial devastation. The BSA does little to nothing to mitigate that risk and the only other way to mitigate that is through 1:1 youth to parent involvement where children are under direct, parental supervision at all times. This is antithetical to a youth lead program like the BSA.
Bots use sites like this to validate lists of stolen cards with low dollar donations to validate the cards before using them on the target site. Without some one of protection sites like these are quickly flooded with fraudulent transactions and then fined and shut down by Visa and Mastercard.
Maybe if moral virtues can be purchased they were never moral virtues to begin with?
Many moral vices naturally decline with age as physical senses and hormones dull and life loses novelty. It may be a comforting fantasy that we can somehow link our inevitable physical decline to a story of moral progress and assume that our accumulated wisdom would protect us from the folly of youth if we were somehow thrust again into our younger bodies.
But what if instead moral progress is about finding the right way of living? About spending more time with your kid than with a screen.
Maybe the virtue wasn’t in getting over the wall but finding yourself on the other side and choosing it because it is better? Society puts up walls all the time to prevent people from finding themselves on the wrong side of the wall. Nobody ever talks about the “grit” of the addict persistently dodging law enforcement to score their next fix.
Maybe the problem is society putting walls in the wrong place. If that’s true, does it really matter how you get over the wall?
People have different preferences, some people are going to be more productive at home and some less. Some people simply can’t work from home.
I think the challenge is that leadership isn’t coherent when it comes to RTO:
1. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of geography when hiring or building teams. Building geographic centers of excellence where all team members with the same function working closely together used to be a thing. Leadership wants the flexibility to pick the best talent, at the best prices, on short notice but also wants ad-hoc collaboration. Workers are rightly confused when every meeting they have in an office is on Zoom.
2. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of timezone alignment and structured working days. Leadership wants to hire talent across the globe which requires more cross-timezone collaboration and non-standard-work hour meetings. That wasn’t possible when at 5PM to 7PM everyone was commuting. It also isn’t reasonable to expect people to hold a rigid 8AM to 5PM in-office schedule and then take 2 hours of meetings from 6PM to 8PM.
3. Leadership is complains that office space is both essential to productivity AND too expensive to spend money on. Employees home setups in terms of working space, noise isolation, connectivity and configuration are now more productive than what is offered in-office. When leadership took people from dedicated offices, to cubicles, to open seating and then to “hot desking” it was justified that commercial real estate was scarce, expensive and required the sacrifice of productivity to manage costs. Now that it is plentiful and cheap? Leadership is saying that RTO is needed for productivity AND that they will continue to reduce spending on office space per employee.
The only way to mentally reconcile that is to either assume that leadership is incompetent or that they want to return to 18th century sweat shops and envy China’s 9x9x6 culture. I can see why mid-level management is struggling getting compliance which is why they are relying on badge swipes.
I’m not arguing for or against the merits of the recent strikes. I am disputing the notion that Iran’s anti-US stance is purely rhetoric for domestic consumption.
One of the arguments against limited strikes against the Iranians was that it would be simply stirring up the hornets nest and things spiraling out of control.
Other than a brief thaw in relations in 2015 there is nothing that would suggest that Iran’s anti-US rhetoric is for domestic consumption and for show.
North Korea had enough conventional artillery to level Seoul with an estimated 1M casualties. That was why Clinton decided against attacking North Korea as they moved towards building the bomb:
Iran’s deterrent was/is through its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis) along with its sizable missile inventory, anti-air capabilities and strategic threats to oil and gas exports.
Israel’s investment in missile defense and the outcome of the Oct 7th attacks severely weakened Iran’s deterrence to a conventional attack.
I think the lesson should be that any nation that has enough conventional leverage to deter an attack could choose to build nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons may complement, but can’t displace other capabilities.
The US has nuclear weapons but that didn’t deter Iran from launching direct attacks on US troops in the Middle East or sponsoring insurgents in Iraq.
Nuclear weapons are also essential worthless against non nation-state actors such as Al-Qaeda.
Most likely a reaction to how dominant AA recovery programs are for those without means to afford one-on-one counseling combined with the religious overtones.
The BSA settlement over sexual abuse allocations was $2.46B for claims going back to the 1970s. No matter how good the program to prevent abuse today, this generation of controls will be judged against the standards of 2070s. This makes any asset heavy youth program financially untenable.
Personally I think scouting, done right, is a beautiful thing but I don’t see how the program survives or how any similar volunteer program would she able to survive long term.