“The most worthwhile thing is to try and put happiness into the lives of others.”  Quick – who said that?  Since you’re reading a Disney focused website, I bet you said Walt Disney.  If you did, you’d be mistaken.  It was actually Lord Robert Baden-Powell, the man that started the worldwide Scouting movement (aka, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts).  When people think about Scouting they often think about tying knots and building fires and camping and hiking.  But that’s not what Scouting is; that’s what it does.  Scouting is about shaping the lives of young people through example and fun.  Disney is about many things but it can also be used to shape the lives of young people through example and fun.  As you’ll see, Walt Disney and Lord Baden-Powell were two visionaries who had a lot in common.

One of the aims of Scouting is to teach young men and women to be leaders.  The Boy Scouts of America is proud of these statistics:

·         85% of student council presidents were Scouts

·         89% of senior class presidents were Scouts

·         80% of junior class presidents were Scouts

·         17 of our United States Senators are Eagle Scouts

·         Over 60 of our Congressmen are Eagle Scouts

·         Of the 214 former and present astronauts, 142 were Scouts

·         33 of those astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, were Eagle Scouts

(http://www.troop125bsa.com/statistics.htm and http://www.eaglescout.org/finale/coh/optional.html#Significance%20of%20the%20Eagle%20Rank).  Leadership is an important quality to cultivate in young men and women.  Whatever they do in life, whichever path they take, learning the qualities of leadership helps them learn to work with others towards a common goal.  As Walt Disney said, “Of all the things I’ve done the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.”  Tasting leadership as a youngster also gives a boy or girl the knowledge that “You can design and create and build the most beautiful place in the world.  But it takes people to make the dream a reality”, as Walt Disney said.  In Scouting, young people learn that leadership is not about the glory of being the top dog but about coordinating the efforts of the team and serving the team with your own particular talents and vision.

Since the “me” generation of the 70s, too many people have only been concerned with what they can do themselves and what they can get for themselves.  We need to return to teaching our children that they have to work together to improve on this world or create a whole new one.  Or, as Lord Baden-Powell said “The patrol system [the basic building block in Scouting] leads each boy to see that he has some individual responsibility for the good of his patrol.” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Baden-Powell).  When you take your child to Walt Disney World and marvel at the detail of the Pirates of the Caribbean or the beauty of Expedition Everest or the accomplishments noted in Spaceship Earth take a moment to remind your child that these things required the efforts of many people working together.  Use these teachable moments to help your child learn the value of being a leader as opposed to merely the glory because “If you can dream it, you can do it.  Always remember this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse” as Disney said.  Disney and Baden-Powell knew the value of a group of people working together under the vision of a peer leader.

Scouting also values optimism.  In fact, one of the twelve points of the Boy Scout law is to be cheerful.  And Baden-Powell said “a Scout smiles and whistles under all circumstances.”  Disney also knew the value of cheerfulness and optimism.  Or to put it in his words, “I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.”  Neither of these men faced a life without complications.  During the Boer War, Baden-Powell was the commanding officer of the village of Mafeking.  From October 1899 through May of 1900 the village was under siege (http://www.britishbattles.com/great-boer-war/mafeking.htm).  Baden-Powell’s optimism was one of the things that allowed the British troops and the villagers to withstand the siege.  As he said “I have always believed: That if there is the right spirit, we can kick out the ‘im’ from impossible” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Baden-Powell).  Disney faced his share of disappointments as well.  One of the biggest of these was when rights to his character of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit were stolen from him.  But he went on to devise Mickey Mouse and an empire that still has a positive effect on the world today.  And no matter how many people told him something was impossible or just wouldn’t work, Disney had much more optimism in him than that.  His cheerful reaction to the naysayers was to smile and state “it’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”  

I also firmly believe that today’s young people are suffering from an unintended side-effect of the psychological explorations of the Sixties and Seventies.  Too many adults are concerned with a child’s self-esteem and not enough of them realize that true self-esteem comes from knowing a thing is hard and doing it anyway.  Sometimes you fail and sometimes you succeed.  But you always learn something.  Both Baden-Powell’s Scouting movement and Disney’s World can teach young people that it’s the very struggle and occasional, but not guaranteed, triumph that teaches you to be optimistic throughout your life even during the hard times.  This knowledge is empowering and enables young people to do more and more difficult things.   The next time you take your child to Walt Disney World make sure you talk about how none of the magic feelings that he or she experiences would have been possible without the optimism and cheerfulness of Walt Disney through the easy times and the hard.  Use your vacation as a “teachable moment” to remind your child of the value – as it’s stressed in Scouting too – of being cheerful.

Both Walt Disney and Lord Baden-Powell knew they had a message that was worthwhile to teach to young people and as we’ve seen, those messages are still very much needed today.  But both Disney and Baden-Powell knew that there’s a way to educate people that’s effective and there are ways that are not effective.  Baden-Powell always reminded the adults involved with the Scouting movement that “The Scoutmaster teaches the boys to play the game by doing so.”  And Disney knew that “crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.”  Disney also said “I would rather entertain and hope people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.”  Both Scouting and many of the attractions at Disney take this approach to teaching – something that now goes by the name of “edutainment”.  Both of these men knew edutainment was the only way to really teach young people something that would stay with them throughout their lifetimes. 

Scouting does this by involving young people in the kinds of things they enjoy.  For Boy Scouts it’s things like going out in the woods to escape the civilized world of the city just like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn did.  It’s building things and burning things and roughhousing and generally having a good ol’ time.  And while they’re doing this, they’re learning how to take care of themselves and how to work together towards a common goal and citizenship and the value of being trustworthy.  For Girl Scouts it’s doing activities that are important to the girls and learning how to work together and to value themselves as much as the group. For both Boy and Girl Scouts this edutainment also takes the form of patches and badges of honor and rank that are earned through experimenting with different activities.  Disney uses edutainment quite obviously through attractions like Spaceship Earth and Living with the Land and Rafiki’s Planet Watch.  But they also use it in more subtle ways like the attention to detail found in the Expedition Everest queue.  Both Disney and Baden-Powell knew that you have to reach young people where they are with the things that they enjoy before you can teach them anything

 As we have seen, there is much in common between the lessons of Scouting and the lessons that can be learned from the life and World of Walt Disney.  Both Baden-Powell and Disney knew that it’s important to “get a good idea and stay with it.  Do it and work at it until it’s done right”, as Disney said.  Today’s generation is quite fortunate that they both got good ideas and worked them until they were right.  They both also knew that Disney was right when he said that “All our dreams can come true.. if we only have the courage to pursue them.”  However, these bits of knowledge that both Disney and Baden-Powell had are not things that we know instinctively as human beings.  They are things that we have to be taught by one generation to the next.  As a parent, guardian, aunt or uncle, big brother or sister, or friend to a young adult or child, I urge you to take seriously your responsibility to teach these things to the next generation.  Teaching them is not difficult at all when you use the tools of Disney and Scouting. These two worlds, which may seem very different, do in fact teach the same things.  They teach children the value of self, the value of leadership and working together, how to be courageous and cheerful in the face of adversity, how to keep trying until you get it right and how to let nothing stop you in the pursuit of a worthy goal.  Using the magic of Disney and the values of Scouting we as adults can easily follow the advice of Lord Baden-Powell to “leave this world a little better than you found it.”

 (note: All quotes come from http://thinkexist.com unless otherwise noted)

Denise Duggan (who prefers the online persona Hypermommy) is the founder of ScoutingWithTheMouse.com.  She has two sons who are both heavily involved in Scouting (which means she is too).   Her eldest son is homeschooled while her younger son has chosen to attend a traditional middle school.  Her husband smiles and supports her in this dual addiction to Scouting and Disney.  Her website is dedicated to the lessons that can be learned using the magic of Disney.  These lessons are arranged using the requirements of Scouting at all levels for both Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.  However, she also uses these requirements and lessons as teaching tools for her eldest.  She invites you to come explore the ScoutingWithTheMouse.com website to find ways to make your vacation and home activities more educational and fun at the same time using the Disney Difference.