Baden-Powell would have stormed Parliament with an elite bodyguard of Venture Scouts had this happened in his lifetime. With pluck, ingenuity and skills gleaned from such BP publications as 'Pigsticking or Hoghunting', 'Quick Training For War' and 'Adventuring To Manhood', they'd have confounded all efforts to oust them by police and civil servants, hog-tied as they are by statistical horizon scanning, intelligence protocols and health and safety risk assessments. The skills that pacified the wildest outposts of Empire would have trounced the Gameboy generation, and there'd have been ginger beer, handshakes and no hard feelings afterwards.
In an eloquent fit of zeitgeist, the Scout Association has created a badge for Public Relations. World-shattering as this event is not, it does illustrate a disturbing cultural shift. While having pundits and self-appointed luminaries complain about the next generation's outlook seems to be a historical constant, this is certainly fair fodder for their tabloid columns.
Not that there's anything wrong with Scouting moving with the times. The movement's alumni tend not to end up policing the Hindu Kush or fighting the Beastly Hun these days; they are more likely to work long hours in the service sector, live on convenience food and consider CenterParcs a taste of the outdoors. Hardship can certainly breed resourcefulness, self-discipline and independence, but we should cherish our levels of safety and comfort and not mourn the passing of such great winnowers as Typhoid Mary and Lord Kitchener.
So it’s fair and reasonable that the Scout Association should train the good citizens of the 21st century in a relevant way. But shouldn't that training celebrate the extraordinary? Shouldn't it give kids a glimpse of a world outside centrally-heated homes and office cubicles, so that, if only at weekends, they'll be liberated from silicon slavery?
A glance at their website does offer some hope. Fantastic badges in 'Circus Skills', 'Astronautics' and 'Dragon Boating' are available, suggesting that the space in the average tiny scout hut is well used indeed. My particular favourite was 'Master at Arms', conjuring an image of a bewoggled youth as adept with a double-handed broadsword as with an XBox controller.
Two badges on the list however look like they were on their way to a management seminar when they wandered into the wrong room: Administrator and Public Relations. I can't describe them without reading from a powerpoint presentation in my head. The lucky recipient of these badges will have mastered desktop publishing, corporate press releases and presenting his or her organisation in a positive light by audio and visual media. Short of burning laminated brochures, I can't see any of that staving off hypothermia when the weather closes in on Pen-Y-Ghent. What badges will we see next: 'Cold-calling', 'Performance Development Review' and 'Staying On-Message'?
I could dance around the cliché but here it is: Why can't we let kids be kids? Most Scouts will spend their adult lives tolerating the banal minutiae of working life. Why pollute their childhoods with this nonsense, when it could be given over to adventure and wonder? Any sane person will need adventure and wonder in their hearts to get through employed life with their soul intact. Let’s keep corporate fascism in the workaday world where it belongs.
