THE BIRTH OF THE BOY SCOUTS OF THE PHILIPPINES

THE BIRTH OF THE

BOY SCOUTS OF THE PHILIPPINES

Scouting was brought to the Philippines by American soldiers following their occupation of the country in the early 20th century. There were accounts of the presence of Boy Scouts in Manila as early as 1912 as backed by the proceedings of the first BSA National Council Meeting in 1911 and an article in the Boy Scout Story, a book on the beginnings of Scouting in America, published in 1955.

Plans of forming Scouting troops for Filipino boys came from Mrs. Caroline S. Spencer, an American widow doing charity works with the natives in Sulu with Lt. Sherman L. Kiser, a young second lietenant assigned to arrange her transportation and accomodation for her charity work. Upon seeing small boys wandering aimlessly during one of their trips, Mrs. Spencer floated the idea of organizing Boy Scout troops to Lt. Kiser.

The two discussed and planned the matter seriously, but because of Lt. Kiser’s reassignment to Zamboanga and Mrs. Spencer’s return to the United States, their plan in Sulu never materialized. In Zamboanga, Lt. Kiser observed the same aimless behavior of boys and decided to push their plan of forming Boy Scout troops. And so, the first Filipino troop consisting of 26 boys was formed on November 15, 1914. This troop was named Lorillard Spencer in honor of Mrs. Spencer’s son, who was a Boy Scout.

Another formation was documented in 1922 when 16-year old Celso Mirafuente formed a troop in Boac, Marinduque based on a BSA handbook and clippings of Boys Life magazine that came into his possession. This led to the recognition of Mirafuente as the pioneer of Scouting in the province. Through the initiative of the Rotary Club of Manila, in cooperation with other civic oriented groups like the Young Men’s Christian Association, Knights of Columbus, Masons, Elks, the Filipino and Chinese Chambers of Commerce, the United States Army, Catholic and Protestant Churches, and the American Legion, Scouting was officially established in the country as the Philippine Council of the Boy Scouts of the America (BSA).

The Council was chartered as a first class council on December 27, 1923, and its jurisdiction was elevated to a national scope instead of being concentrated only in Manila as originally requested. Being part of the BSA, Scouting programs were administered through the BSA executives from the National Office in New York.

The first full-time executive was A.S. MacFarlane. He was later succeeded by Ernest E. Voss, who held the position until the effectivity of the turnover of the Council to the BSP on January 01, 1938. Col. Joseph E.H. Stevenot worked for the speedy Filipinization of Scouting. Under his stewardship, the Philippine Council – BSA prepared the BSP bill and petitioned its enactment from the National Assembly to the Office of the President. The BSP bill was sponsored by Iloilo Assemblyman Tomas Confesor and was signed into law as Commonwealth Act. No. 111 by President Manuel L. Quezon on October 31, 1936, creating the Boy Scouts of the Philippines as a public corporation with the purpose of promoting “the ability of boys to do useful things for themselves and others, to train them in Scoutcraft, and to teach them patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred virtues, using the methods which are in common use by boy Scouts.”

THE SEVEN CHARTER MEMBERS AND FOUNDING

Fathers of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines are Joseph Emile H. Stevenot, Arsenio N. Luz, Carlos P. Romulo, General Vicente Lim, Judge Manuel R. Camus, Jorge B. Vargas and Gabriel A. Daza.

On January 01, 1938, the inauguration of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines was held in front of the Legislative Building in Manila, with Exequiel Villacorta taking over as Chief Scout Executive, equivalent to the position of today’s Secretary General.

J.E.H. Stevenot served as the first President of the BSP, with Jorge B. Vargas as First Vice President, Carlos P. Romulo as Second Vice President, General Vicente Lim as Treasurer, Judge Manuel R. Camus as National Scout Commissioner, Exequiel Villacorta as Chief Scout Executive, and Severino V. Araos as Deputy Chief Scout Executive.

Several years after Commonwealth Act. No. 111, with its subsequent amendments under Presidential Decree No. 460 and Republic Act No. 7278, the Boy Scouts of the Philippines continues to strive in pursuing its mission – to inculcate in our Scouts love of God, country and fellowmen; to prepare the youth for responsible leadership; and to contribute to nation-building according to the ideals, principles and programs of Scouting.

Greetings! This blog is all about the life inside the world of scouting and what is scouting all about.

What is scouting?
Dictionary -the characteristic activity and occupation of a Boy Scout or Girl Scout; the Scout movement.
what it's like to be a BOY SCOUT
Being a boy scout stepping out of your comfort zone and helping others. It means doing things for people other than yourself and feeling good about it.
People also ask

What do they do in Scouts?
Scouts take part in activities as diverse as kayaking, abseiling, expeditions overseas, photography, climbing and zorbing. As a Scout you can learn survival skills, first aid, computer programming, or even how to fly a plane. There's something for every young person.

What is the purpose of the Boy Scouts?
"It is the mission of the Boy Scouts of America to serve others by helping to instill values in young people and, in other ways, to prepare them to make ethical choices during their lifetime in achieving their full potential. The values we strive to instill are based on those found in the Scout Oath and Law."

Who is the father of Scouting?
Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell
Born: 22 February 1857, Paddington, London, United Kingdom
Died: 8 January 1941, Nyeri, Kenya

How did scouts start?

Scouting virtually started itself, but the trigger that set it going was the 1908 publication of Scouting for Boys written by Robert Baden-Powell. At Charterhouse, one of England's most famous public schools, Baden-Powell had an interest in the outdoors. Later, as a military officer, Baden-Powell was stationed in British India in the 1880s where he took an interest in military scouting and in 1884 he published Reconnaissance and Scouting. In 1896, Baden-Powell was assigned to the Matabeleland region in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as Chief of Staff to Gen. Frederick Carrington during the Second Matabele War, and it was here (in June, 1896) that he first met and began a lifelong friendship with Frederick Russell Burnham, the American-born Chief of Scouts for the British Army in Africa. This was a formative experience for Baden-Powell not only because he had the time of his life commanding reconnaissance missions into enemy territory, but because many of his later Boy Scout ideas took hold here. During their joint scouting patrols into the Matobo Hills, Burnham augmented Baden-Powell's woodcraft skills, inspiring him and sowing seeds for both the programme and for the code of honour later published in Scouting for Boys. Practised by frontiersmen of the American Old West and Indigenous peoples of the Americas, woodcraft was generally little known to the British Army but well-known to the American scout Burnham. These skills eventually formed the basis of what is now called scoutcraft, the fundamentals of Scouting. Both men recognised that wars in Africa were changing markedly and the British Army needed to adapt; so during their joint scouting missions, Baden-Powell and Burnham discussed the concept of a broad training programme in woodcraft for young men, rich in exploration, tracking, fieldcraft, and self-reliance. It was also during this time in the Matobo Hills that Baden-Powell first started to wear his signature campaign hat like the one worn by Burnham, and it was here that Baden-Powell acquired his Kudu horn, the Ndebele war instrument he later used every morning at Brownsea Island to wake the first Boy Scouts and to call them together in training courses.Three years later, in South Africa during the Second Boer War, Baden-Powell was besieged in the small town of Mafeking by a much larger Boer army (the Siege of Mafeking). The Mafeking Cadet Corpswas a group of youths that supported the troops by carrying messages, which freed the men for military duties and kept the boys occupied during the long siege. The Cadet Corps performed well, helping in the defense of the town (1899–1900), and were one of the many factors that inspired Baden-Powell to form the Scouting movement. Each member received a badge that illustrated a combined compass point and spearhead. The badge's logo was similar to the fleur-de-lis shaped arrowhead that Scouting later adopted as its international symbol.[19] The Siege of Mafeking was the first time since his own childhood that Baden-Powell, a regular serving soldier, had come into the same orbit as "civilians"—women and children—and discovered for himself the usefulness of well-trained boys.In the United Kingdom, the public, through newspapers, followed Baden-Powell's struggle to hold Mafeking, and when the siege was broken, he had become a national hero. This rise to fame fuelled the sales of the small instruction book he had written in 1899 about military scouting and wilderness survival, Aids to Scouting, that owed much to what he had learned from discussions with Burnham.On his return to England, Baden-Powell noticed that boys showed considerable interest in Aids to Scouting, which was unexpectedly used by teachers and youth organizations as their first Scouting handbook. He was urged to rewrite this book for boys, especially during an inspection of the Boys' Brigade, a large youth movement drilled with military precision. Baden-Powell thought this would not be attractive and suggested that the Boys' Brigade could grow much larger were Scouting to be used. He studied other schemes, parts of which he used for Scouting.

In July 1906, Ernest Thompson Seton sent Baden-Powell a copy of his 1902 book The Birchbark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians. Seton, a British-born Canadian-American living in the United States, met Baden-Powell in October 1906, and they shared ideas about youth training programs. In 1907 Baden-Powell wrote a draft called Boy Patrols. In the same year, to test his ideas, he gathered 21 boys of mixed social backgrounds (from boy's schools in the London area and a section of boys from the Poole, Parkstone, Hamworthy, Bournemouth, and Winton Boys' Brigade units) and held a week-long camp in August on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, Dorset, England. His organizational method, now known as the Patrol System and a key part of Scouting training, allowed the boys to organize themselves into small groups with an elected patrol leader.


In the autumn of 1907, Baden-Powell went on an extensive speaking tour arranged by his publisher, Arthur Pearson, to promote his forthcoming book, Scouting for Boys. He had not simply rewritten his Aids to Scouting; he omitted the military aspects and transferred the techniques (mainly survival) to non-military heroes: backwoodsmen, explorers (and later on, sailors and airmen). He also added innovative educational principles (the Scout method) by which he extended the attractive game to a personal mental education.


At the beginning of 1908, Baden-Powell published Scouting for Boys in six fortnightly parts, setting out activities and programmes which existing youth organisations could use. The reaction was phenomenal, and quite unexpected. In a very short time, Scout Patrols were created up and down the country, all following the principles of Baden-Powell's book. In 1909, the first Scout Rally was held at Crystal Palace in London, to which 11,000 Scouts came—and some girls dressed as Scouts and calling themselves "Girl Scouts". Baden-Powell retired from the Army and, in 1910, he formed The Boy Scouts Association and, later, The Girl Guides. By the time of The Boy Scouts Association's first census in 1910, it had over 100,000 Scouts.


Scouting for Boys was published in England later in 1908 in book form. The book is now the fourth-bestselling title of all time, and was the basis for the later American version of the Boy Scout Handbook.


At the time, Baden-Powell intended that the scheme would be used by established organizations, in particular the Boys' Brigade, from the founder William A. Smith. However, because of the popularity of his person and the adventurous outdoor games he wrote about, boys spontaneously formed Scout patrols and flooded Baden-Powell with requests for assistance. He encouraged them, and the Scouting movement developed momentum. In 1910 Baden-Powell formed The Boy Scouts Association in the United Kingdom. As the movement grew, Sea Scouts, Air Scouts, and other specialized units were added to the program.