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قراءة كتاب Educational Work of the Boy Scouts
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Educational Work of the Boy Scouts
youth instinctively responds to the Boy Scout program. As America is the melting pot of the nations, even so scouting is the melting pot of the boys of the nations.
Fortunately, the program needs no modifications or special manipulation to "Americanize" its followers. It is inherently an Americanizing program. In Manhattan's crowded East Side, since 1912, when the first scout troop was founded there, thousands of boys have taken the Scout Oath and Law and followed its principles and lived its out-of-door life. To-day there are 25 troops in New York City, numbering 800 boys. Every scoutmaster and assistant scoutmaster in the district is an ex-scout. These troops have a splendid record of war-service work, and it has been declared of them that they were the greatest single agency in operation rightly to interpret the war to their foreign-born neighbors.
The aggressive introduction of scouting into all our industrial sections, the enlistment of the men of those sections (who are eligible) as local council members, troop committeemen, scoutmasters, the fullest possible round of scouting activities for the men and the boys in this country who do not yet know America, but aspire to be her sons, will help to solve all our industrial problems and preserve our national ideals and institutions.
SEA SCOUTING—A BRANCH OF THE BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA.
Sea scouting is another important branch of scouting which aims to develop water scouting and nautical activities and training of all sorts. Chief Sea Scout James A. Wilder says:
Sea scouting is the way whereby scouting fulfills its obligation to the American boy to prepare him for emergencies on water as well as on land. High officials of the Navy and the merchant marine have expressed their unqualified approval of the entire program of seamanship, watermanship, cloud study, sailmaking, boats under oars and sail, shore camping, and the other fascinating activities. Our merchant marine languishes for lack of instructed seamen. It is not a far cry to the time when boys who have followed the seascout program will be found in the four quarters of the globe, doing business on great waters because they, as sea scouts, received the same training which helped keep our flag flying on the seven seas.
During the year 1919 the sea scouting department tripled its membership and had regularly commissioned ships in 19 States. It is essentially an older-boy plan and is not a substitute for scouting but a development of it. Only boys over 15 years of age are eligible to join a sea scout ship, though a preliminary rank, that of Cabin Boy, is open to younger scouts who are able to meet certain tests in "water preparedness" and take the Sea Promise.
On my honor, I will, as a scout and as a cabin boy, do my best to become proficient in scouting.
Like all scouting, sea scouting is both recreation and education. A sea scout has a jolly good time in the water and on it, but at the same time he is acquiring a tremendous amount of practical knowledge and nautical efficiency which will stand him in good stead whether he follows the sea or not.