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Comment by cududa | Hacker News Reader

Dunno, when I did cub scouts / Boy Scouts even 20 years ago it was basically glorified arts and crafts

When I did it about 15 years ago we got dumped in a fenced in bit of eucalypt forest with our pockets stuffed with "normal" items like knives/shoelaces/mueslibars/1.25L bottles of water/first aid kits and told to survive for 24 hours. Granted it's almost impossible to actually get yourself killed in 24 hours, we had quick access to leaders if we needed them, and we were all relatively trustworthy kids who'd trained for it, but it felt like more responsibility than arts and crafts.

I think a lot of parents would refuse such exercise today since they precious children could get hurt. I also think no one will do it anyway since parent will hold you responsible for any scratchs or dommages.

> 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...

The wording of their comment suggests heavily to me that they are from Australia. I participated in scouts in Australia about the same amount of time ago as we did somewhat similar things, going on camps where there was a reasonable amount of independence and I would have described it as arts and craftsy.

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.

I was a Boy Scout in America; we did the same thing. It was a great experience.

The US is a very large and diverse country. There are lots of outdoor adventure sort of activities in much of the country.

Very much so. Camping, hiking, fishing are very popular in a lot of places. There are still many areas where it's not uncommon for a boy to get a rifle or shotgun at around age 10 and start learning to hunt. This modern super-protective cocoon life is largely a suburban thing.

Wow, sounds like an Order of the Arrow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Arrow) Ordeal. My large-city suburban US troop did this (I moved away before I was eligible to do it)!

I definitely remember doing this at OA.

By all accounts the experience varies enormously between troops. I’m sure someone who learned enough wilderness survival skills for it to be useful in their military career will pop up in the comments, and some more who suffered as you did.

Haha yeah. Camping was old hat to me when I went in the Marines. None of that stuff surprised me. One brutally cold night outside of Victorville we were supposed to dig in fighting holes but the ground was solid and nobody got more than a few inches deep despite hacking at it all day. We were going to be there all night.

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.

Id imagine it can be good if you’re never exposed to camping/survival otherwise.

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.

When I did scouts many years ago, there was definitely a lot of variation by troop. Some, like the one I was in, had a lot of weekend camping/hiking, extended trips, summer camp, etc. and the weekly/biweekly meetings were mostly just organizing for those activities. Other troops, scouts was mostly just those meetings with games/arts/crafts/etc.

In my troop, most of the kids had never been Cub Scouts. Everyone in my patrol earned Eagle, and we never did any of the prepackaged artsy-craftsy stuff.

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.

Yea, for the first year of cub scouts with 5 year olds, that's the appropriate kind of activity that combines play, limited strength and skills, and allows you to mix in information about nature, society, arts, science, etc. That said, you also start camping the same year, with your parents, and transition to sharing tents with other kids over then next year or two. By the time kids are 10, they are running the boy scout troop, and the adults should be there just for support and advice. I put it this way: In cub scouts, the adults are at the front of the room. In boy scouts the adults are in the back of the room. In Venture/Explorer scouts, the adults are in the next room.

Agreed. I'm 34, I quit scouts at 13 as my father died just before I Turned 13 and everyone was treating me like a leper because they didn't know what to say or do BUT scout camps were:

- 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

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