Don’t knock it …

[qwazse]

There have been a couple of conversations like …

Post: I/he/she did it this way …

Reply: That’s dumb

Post: I do it because … It works … I recommend it ….

Reply: You are a terrible scouter if you do it that way … you’re ruining it for the kids … no wonder people don’t want to join scouting anymore.

If you think this a healthy way to respond to a post, you couldn’t be more mistaken. It’s fine if you don’t like a strategy. It’s fine if you would rather scouters do something else. Tell us what that is. Let us know how it worked. Pro’s? Con’s? Historical references? Spell ‘em out. It’s totally inappropriate and not healthy for you to demean  a scouter because they don’t agree with you. Look down on too many such folks, and the hypoxia from such an altitude must be suffocating. To save a scouter from such a dire fate, I’ll report such attempts to denigrate a scouter to the moderator, but I can only do so much after the fact.

Instead, I am going to offer a method of resilience against scouters who suggest something you are sure is utterly stupid, will never work, and is emblematic of something wrong with society. Since these are rarely matters of health and safety. here’s what I suggest:

Try it.

If you really want to prove someone wrong, try their method. Let your scouts know you’re experimenting with uniform/patrol/outdoors/adult association or whatever and want to do one thing differently for a few months. Ask their evaluation after a good run doing it differently. Go back? Keep on? Tweak it for us? Then, let us know what your scouts/scouters/parents say.

Then, instead of wasting your words trying to cut down a scouter, you will give us one more data point for us to decide what might actually help our unit.

scout (v) = explore, observe, report