Duty to God

Each person has a responsibility to search beyond what is material for a force higher than mankind. This involves seeking: 

• A Spiritual Reality that gives meaning and direction to one’s life; and

• To discover meaning in spiritual values and to live one’s daily life in accordance with these values.

       When these three simple principles are truly part of a way of life and are adhered to simultaneously, any form of fundamentalism or fanaticism is necessarily excluded.

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Duty to others

In broad terms, this is one’s responsibility towards everything material that is not oneself.
This means:

• Recognising and taking into account in the way in which one lives one’s life that one is not the only important person on this earth, that each person has rights, feelings, hopes, needs, etc.;

•  Recognising that people are interdependent,i.e. no one can live in isolation from others. Everyone needs relationships with others in order to fulfil themselves as persons and everyone can benefit from the contribution that each person makes to the world. Each person, therefore, has a responsibility towards others. This involves:

•  Respecting each person’s dignity

•  playing an active and constructive role in society and making a personal contribution to it

•  helping out in times of need and defending the defenceless, whether they are one’s next door neighbour or whether they live in a very different environment at the other end of the world.

• recognising and taking into account, in the way in which one lives one’s life, the integrityof the natural world.

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Duty to self

     Each person has a duty to develop one’s autonomy and assume responsibility for oneself.
This includes:

• taking responsibility for one’s own development (physical, intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual)
• striving to live life in a way which respects oneself as a person (e.g. taking care of one’s health, standing up for one’s rights as a human being, making decisions that one feels deep inside are right for oneself as a person, etc.).

    Being able to do so presupposes striving to get to know oneself better in all the richness and complexity that characterizes each person with strengths and weaknesses, hopes, needs, and so on.

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A Constructive Direction: Scouting’s Principles

       Every movement – or organised body, for that matter – has a number of fundamental beliefs which underlie the purpose of its existence, orient what it seeks to achieve and how it goes about achieving its goals. As an educational movement, Scouting clearly has a social responsibility: to the young people it serves, to the families who entrust their cherished youngsters to Scouting’s care and to the world at large. The goals of education are clear: to develop as an autonomous, supportive, responsible and committed individual and member of society. However, there must be clear guidelines which orient the development of the young person towards these goals. It is Scouting’s principles (generally referred to as “Duty to self”, “Duty to others” and “Duty to God”) which provide these guidelines. They are the basis of the value system which governs the Movement as a whole. These principles, therefore, give direction to Scouting’s educational policy as a Movement, to the educational approach used with young people and to the way in which the elements of the Scout Method are used so as to give constructive and coherent direction to the development of the young person.

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The Purpose Of Scouting

• According to Scouting’s educational philosophy, each person is born with a unique potential which can be developed in a constructive direction. 
• Making this potential a reality involves developing all of one’s capacities – physical, intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual – in the direction of the goals to be achieved. 
• Evidently, as education is the work of a lifetime, Scouting cannot fully develop anyone’s potential in all areas. 
• Scouting can simply accompany each Scout, for a time, along that person’s path of development and help each person to develop the inner resources he or she will need to continue to develop without Scouting’s help. 
• After all, if Scouting were a crutch on which people relied all their lives, it would certainly have failed in what it is trying to achieve. 
• Scouting, therefore, simply seeks to make a contribution to this process of self-education during the years when a person can truly benefit from its structured educational support system. 
• The age range for which Scouting can most benefit young people corresponds approximately to the second decade of life.
• By encouraging young people to use and develop all of their capacities in a constructive way today, Scouting seeks to help young people to realise that they have within themselves what it takes to already make a difference – to their own lives and to the world in which they live. 
• As they become ready to expand their horizons and seek new challenges, Scouting helps them to use their experience and to further develop their capacities to live and grow as fulfilled individuals and as active and constructive members of society. 
• Whether or not a person will actually develop that potential depends, amongst other factors, on the presence of a supportive, structured environment during the formative years which stimulates the young person to bring out of him or herself – and develop – what  is constructive, to the detriment of what is destructive. Scouting seeks to offer young people such an environment.

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Scout Is Education

“EDUCATION? BUT THAT IS SCHOOL!”

       Scouting is an educational movement for young people. However, “education” means different things to different people. In everyday language in some parts of the world, education is primarily associated, at its most basic level, with learning to read, write and master basic arithmetic and, on a higher level, with gaining academic knowledge and vocational skills through school, university, and so on. In Scouting, however, education is considered in its broad sense as being the process through which each of us develops our various capabilities throughout life, both as an individual and as a member of society. The aim of education, in this broad sense, is to contribute to the full development of an autonomous2, supportive, responsible and committed person.

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Definition Of Education

A DEFINITION OF EDUCATION:
     A life-long process which enables the continuous development of a person’s capacities both as an individual and as a member of society.

THE GOAL OF EDUCATION:
    To contribute to the full development of an autonomous, supportive, responsible and committed individual.

      Autonomous:
          able to make one’s own decisions and to manage one’s
          life.

      Supportive:
          able to actively care about and for others.

      Responsible:
          able to assume the consequences of one’s decisions,
          to keep one’s commitments and to complete what one
          undertakes.

      Committed:
           able to live according to one’s values, to support causes
           or an ideal which one finds important.

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