'SCOUTING IS ONE OF THE MINOR MIRACLES OF THE PRECIOUS, NAMBY-PAMBY AGE
IN WHICH WE LIVE'
Sunday October 17,2010
By Martin Townsend
WINTER draws on, as old comedians used to say, and it's time to reflect
on the best memories of summer. For me, at least one of those times was
standing in the arrivals lounge at Heathrow and seeing my two sons, 16
and 14, return tanned and ever so slightly bedraggled from an
international scouting jamboree at Kandersteg in Switzerland.
An annual extravaganza, bringing together thousands of scouts and
guides, it kept my boys out in the open air for 12 days' hiking,
climbing and, judging from one piece of film I saw on their return,
hurtling at top speed down the longest toboggan run I've seen outside
the Winter Olympics. They loved every minute.
Long-time readers of this column will be aware of the high regard in
which I hold the scouting movement. To my mind it is one of the minor
miracles of the precious, claustrophobic, namby-pamby age in which we
live that something as practical, energetic and positive as scouting has
been able to survive. Now is surely the time for scouting to be
recognised for the great force for good that it is and drawn into the
general syllabus of our schools.
There was a time, not so long ago, when children were allowed to be
children and the adult world, if it encroached on their lives at all,
was generally benign. We wanted our children to behave and to learn but
we didn't want to impose adult sensibilities, values and interests on
them too soon. Technology changed all that.
Computers and mobile phoneshave opened a window on every aspect of the
adult world, good and evil, while simultaneously trapping our young
people in their rooms, staring at a computer screen or tap-tapping out a
text, Twitter or Facebook entry. They are forced, by peer pressure and
the temptations of the technology itself, to grow up very quickly but
ina strange sort of isolation, connected to the outside world but in no
way obliged to interact with it. No good can come from any of this. It
is a trend that will blight at least one generation, possibly many
generations to come.
The Government has set itself an educational agenda that is refreshingly
more radical than the last (which, let's face it, wouldn't bediscipline
in schools and to sweep away the sort of political correctness that
prohibits teachers from separating fighting pupils on the grounds that
they might have to lay their hands on one of them. It is also shining a
spotlight on parents, trying to find a way to encourage them to take
more responsibility for their children. All of this is good. What it is
not doing though is setting up viable alternatives to the toxic
web-surfing and texting long into the night that is leaving children
exhausted, fretful and paranoid. Swapping physical education for
cheerleading, or something equally patronising to a quasi-celebrity
lifestyle, is not going to do it.
What our education system needs is some radical thinking of a slightly
retro nature: one full day of properly organised scouting and guiding a
week. It would be a chance for young people to strike out into open
spaces to reconnect with a natural world that has not only slipped away
from them but may never have featured in their lives at all. Without
wishing to sound like Prince Charles, how many children under 12 have
ever been fishing or camped under canvas? How many have tried to build
and light a campfire and do their own cooking?
Our still overly liberal, educational elite might assume that scouting
is "old-fashioned" and has no place in a world of PS3s and iPhones. That
merely underlines how narrow minded and conservative they are. If we can
recognise the problem, that our children are looking inwards and almost
never looking out, then we can see the solution. THERE is no point
teaching "good citizenship" or something equally banal, to a child who
has a mobile hidden under the desk, thumbs in mid-text, their mind
anywhere but on what is being taught. Let the gadgets stay in the
classroom for one day a week, along with the designer trainers, and get
the class out into the mud and the rain of a British afternoon in the
countryside.
I still remember the big, tired grins on the faces of my lads when they
came back from the ice and snow of Switzerland. They haven't looked
quite as happy as that for a very long time. Let's get some of that
feeling back into our schools.
