Venturing: the most traditional program in BSA

Venturing¹, a program designed for the high-school live stage, is BSA’s (why I don’t like SA) most traditional Scouting program.

Why Venturing is traditional

(The video above has additional detail beyond this narrative.)

Why “most traditional”? Of all BSA’s programs, Venturing comes closest to the original vision of Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting’s founder, and to the reasonable evolution embodied in international Scouting practice. Examples:

• Even though official Venturing documents say it does not use patrols, Venturing is BSA’s sole exemplar of the traditional patrol method!² The patrol method mainly means an all-in focus on teams of youth and the adventures they own. Venturing crews typically act as independent patrols.
• It fulfills Robert Baden-Powell’s 1918 vision for high schoolers³ to have their own program.
• It closely matches how international peers have evolved their programs, all of whom long ago adopted a linear progression of programs that are generally 3-4 years long.
• It is the only BSA program that emphasizes genuine leadership.
• It fits the model envisioned by the founder and that is a norm in the rest of the world, where the emphasis is on fun, youth-owned adventure, not on badges.

Additionally, Venturing is part of a continuous chain of senior-youth programs dating back 112 years.

Scouts BSA is a middle-school program

Your high schooler doesn’t have to be stuck in Scouts BSA, a middle-school program that has infantilized high schoolers for 116 years.

BSA “engages” high schoolers by saddling them with babysitting chores and making them staff a corporate-bureaucracy simulation. This arrangement is peculiar to BSA. It displaces the patrol method. It also substitutes bureaucratic roles for genuine leadership. This design is contrary to the founder’s vision, and it causes BSA to lag decades behind international peers.

None of the familiar arguments for holding high schoolers back in the middle-school program holds up to scrutiny. They are just excuses to kick the can down the road on BSA’s obsolete program design.

Your high schooler deserves a high-school program

BSA has spent 116 years trying to solve the “older-youth problem” while insisting that these older youth stay in a middle-school program. This is institutional incompetence. If an obsolete model has failed for 116 years, competent institutions try better ideas.

Parents must value their child’s development over BSA’s obstinance. Reject the obsolete program design, rip off the band aid, and move your high schooler to Venturing.

High schoolers do not belong in a middle-school program. They are as deserving of age-level programming as any other group in Scouting. (And middle schoolers do not depend on being supervised by high schoolers. They will do much better owning their own experience, with adult mentorship.)

Find a crew today at beascout.scouting.org. If you cannot locate a crew, contact your council about starting one!

1. In BSA norms, the word “Venturing” is both the name of the actual program and a collective noun that includes Sea Scouts. Venturing and Sea Scouts are sibling older-youth programs serving the same age range. Sea Scouting, which has a nautical focus, was administratively part of Venturing from 1998 until 2016. ↩︎
2. The traditional patrol method is simply an emphasis on teams of youth owning their own adventures. While “patrol method” is used to describe how the middle-school program, Scouts BSA, is organized, that program does not use the patrol method. Instead, it uses a corporate-bureaucracy simulation, which makes it an outlier in the broader Scouting world. ↩︎
3. Baden-Powell did not use the modern American term “high schooler”, but the age range in his 1918 proposal is analogous to today’s high-school years. ↩︎