FWIW, Cub Scouts / Boy Scouts are a pretty great place to get those same skills and experiences. Great opportunity to get a well rounded childhood.
It works great for "normal" kids but for any kid even the slightest bit non-neurotypical, it's going to be absolute hell.
Society is not like this, family is not like this, even with your spouse, kids, or brothers/sisters you wont be like this.
Being criticized, ostracized by some, shunned by others, also helps make someone learn to socialize (which includes conforming to a few norms, that's part of being into a society instead of alone in the jungle).
And there are two other things too:
1) Everyone gets some of that treatment (even the popular jocks for example get talked about behind their backs as brainless or whatever). People that act like they are the only recipients, are too self-absorbed to see it.
2) Not everything someone brings or who their character is is good to begin with, just because its "theirs" or "original" etc. The group can have some pathologies itself, but it can help shape everyone to be better too.
Luckily for me, Girl Scouts was only somewhat bad one year. We moved, and then I hated the activities which focused around makeup and "girl stuff" instead of crafts and camping and things. My shunning was in school itself, and unfortunately the teachers didn't help at all.
Honestly a large amount of troops are maintained by mormons or others as extended wings of their belief systems.
AFAIK, Mormons recently voted to stop using Boy Scouts as their de facto youth activities organization. The looming crash in membership numbers as a consequence is partly what prompted the organization to go co-ed.
But that's fine, as it also takes a huge and heavy thumb off the conservative pan of the political balance of the national organization. Without them, BSA can now be more open to LGBT scouts and leaders. Maybe even atheists someday. But...
Each troop is shaped in some part by their individual charter and the relationship with the sponsoring organization. If a troop meets in a church, it is likely to be more religious than one that meets in an elementary school gymnasium, or other municipal-owned building.
It's not a monolithic organization. Each council is different, and each troop has a lot of autonomy to organize its own activities.
This leads to situations where every troop within a 100 mile radius of your kid might be a complete mismatch for them, but if you do happen to find one that fits, it will likely remain that way until they age out.
If you can't find a scout troop near you that isn't filled with personality clashes, your kid will likely want to move away when they get the chance anyway, because the scout troops reflect the local culture. They will encounter the same kids at the high schools.
[1] The program is officially no longer known as Boy Scouts in the US, now that it's starting to go co-ed.
Next to me was a big pile of wood chips for some reason. Knowing this would keep me warm and off of the ground, I lined my hole with a few inches of chips, training be damned. I was sleeping soundly (and warmly) when the company was roused at 0300 to go back to base. Nobody else slept a wink except those close enough to me to be warned. Basically, the CO got cold so we went home.
lol. I learned that survival training in the Scouts. Good times.
I had to go through SERE for aircrew (which is in Spokane, WA) and that was the first time in my life I was ever out in the woods. It was such an insane shock and learning experience. I think there’s a lot of value being exposed to that stuff even if you have no desire to do it recreationally.
We crafted meals and campfires and patrol flags and lashed together poles to make camp gateways with banners and flags hanging off of it.
We slept inside caves, rapelled down cliffsides, and did weekend-sized training trips for week-long outdoor travel destinations like Quetico/Boundary Waters for canoeing, and Philmont for hiking, and then still did the council-organized camporees.
My troop joined with several others in the council to organize our own summer camp, because they thought the one run by the council was too weak, with respect to earning merit badges. You might get two or three badges at Ransburg. In the LBL group-camp area, you might earn a dozen, while also learning stuff like bow-drill firecrafting that isn't even a requirement for any badge. If you weren't in the right troops, you didn't even know about it.
The quality of the adult leadership absolutely has an impact on the experience for the kids, and that varies greatly. The economic class of the parents is also a factor. Some of the more interesting activities cost more money. That's when fundraising and sponsorship comes in. Richer parents get to have more independent troops.
If I ever had any inkling of going into the military, it all might have been an adequate replacement for about four weeks worth of training. Which would have gone instead into unlearning independent initiative and doing things the military way, instead of the situationally adaptive way. Scouts has a lot of ceremony in it, which seems somewhat lame, cult-like, and pseudo-patriotic in retrospect. That might have helped in a military career more than knowing how to build campfires and small game snares.
> Granted it's almost impossible to actually get yourself killed in 24 hours
You should not under estimate the stupid thing children/adolescent can do today...
You mention concern about liability these days, but it's important to remember not everywhere is America. I can't speak to the rest of the world, but Australia is definitely nowhere near as litigious as the US. I could definitely see something like what they described still happening in Australia today.
- stamping pre-cut leather and using vinyl cord to 'stitch' it together to make wallets
- shooting splintered fiberglass bows at targets 5 feet away
- shooting bb guns older than my father 5 feet away
- singing cadences about "Uncle Dougie" the head of camp Belzer
Scout meetings were:
- carving soap into eskimos
- painting pinewood derby cars
- making a toolbox from pre-cut wood
- making model airplane from pre-cut wood
- doing idiotic skits that in hindsight were wildly innaporpriate like when I had to stand in front of everyone and go "When I grow up, I want to be a baker. Don't, eclaire turns and grabs butt buy my buns!" while others said things like "Be a surgeon. Needle, thread, stab him in the head" and "Be a girlscout, Heya mister, hiya mister *pretends to raise a skirt and show leg" wanna buy a cookIEEEE"?
God. I need therapy don't I?!
Camping trips were:
- Dads that have never camped, trying to drag full kitchens into the woods and burning every meal (my father refused to go on scout trips because he was a proper woodsman and they'd all be like "Mark can you help us with our tent/where's the bathroom/is this poison ivy/oh my god is this a tick/can I eat this/how do I start this fire, where's the gasoline"
- Visiting the visitor's centers in state parks
- Walking on, often paved or drastically improved, par trails
- Group trips to the general store to buy ice cream and candy