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Scouting is a game for boys, under the leadership of boys, in which elder brothers can give their younger brothers healthy environment and encourage them to healthy activities such as will help them to develop Citizenship.
Its strongest appeal is through Nature Study and Woodcraft. It deals with the individual, not with the Company. It raises intellectual as well as purely physical or purely moral qualities.
At first it used to aim for these ends - now by experience we know that, where properly handled, it gains them.
Perhaps the best exponent of the aim and methods of Scouting has been Dean James E. Russell, of Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. He writes thus:
"The program of the Boy Scouts is the man's job cut down to boy's size. It appeals to the boy not merely because he is a boy, but because he is a man in the making . . . The Scouting program does not ask of the boy anything that the man does not do; but step by step it takes him from the place where he is until he reaches the place where he would be . . .
"It is not the curriculum of Scouting that is the most striking feature, but it is the method. As a systematic scheme of leading boys to do the right thing and to inculcate right habits it is almost ideal. In the doing, two things stand out - the one is that habits are fixed; the other is that it affords an opportunity for initiative, self-control, self-reliance, and self-direction.
"In the development of initiative Scouting depends not merely on its program of work for the boy, but in a marvelous way it also utilises its machinery of administration. In the administrative scheme a splendid opportunity is given to break away from any incrusting method. It comes about in the Patrol and in the Troop. It teaches the boys to work together in teams. It secures co-operative effort for a common end; that is a democratic thing in and of itself . . .
"By encouraging your Scouts in a healthy, cheery, and not in a sancti- monious looking-for-a-reward spirit to do Good Turns as a first step and to do service for the community as a development, you can do more for them even than by encouraging their proficiency or their discipline or their knowledge, because you are teaching them not how to get a living so much as how to live."
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