Artifact of the Week 20240628 - Scouting's Founding Documents

When Baden-Powell returned to England after the Siege at Mafeking, he was surprised to see his training manual, Aids to Scouting, was being bought and used by kids and youth-related groups to learn about self-reliance, discipline, woodcraft, and more. Because the manual was written to help prepare adult men to be better soldiers in the British Army, B-P saw its lessons as valuable, but they needed to be made appropriate for a different audience. B-P set out to write down a framework for teaching these valuable life skills to young boys, ultimately creating a Suggestion for Scouting, a Scheme for Scouting, and a Trial for Scouting. More importantly, he de-militarized his Aids to Scouting Manual and created a six-part set of pamphlets called Scouting for Boys. With all of these tools in place, what seemed to be a method of making a better citizen for the British Empire became a worldwide movement, creating better citizens in nearly every nation around the world.