[RonF]

I'll buy the issue of not enough outdoor time. I'd rather have a patrol camp be the center of activity both weekends. But the lack of outdoor skills cuts both ways. Is Wood Badge, advanced unit leader training, the place to be teaching basic outdoor skills? There's now a separate outdoor skills course for that (back in my generation, all the Dads had been in the Army). People should take that if they need to learn those skills, or hang out in a Troop a while and learn them from the other leaders and kids.

With WB 2000, you can get a Den Leader in there that has no outdoor skills at all, mixed in with someone like me who has all kinds of outdoor skills. There's no way that he or she could ever be put on equal footing with me. In fact there's no reason for them to do so, if the Den Leader is going to be a Cub Scout leader for the next 6 years like my Pack's late Cubmaster. So WB now concentrates on the leadership issues, and leaves the outdoor skills as a separate issue.

I agree that there are many fewer people with outdoor skills. We need to teach them that, but perhaps not in Wood Badge.

[ghostcat]

You make an excellent point. It probably isn't the place for basic skills. I don't mean to imply that the training wasn't excellent, because it was but it just felt more like a business seminar than a scout training to me. I guess the truth is that I feel that Scouting as a whole is seems to be drifting a little bit away from the emphasis on the outdoors. An good example of this is the Order of the Arrow, for 75 plus years it was the national camping honor society of scouting now it is known as the National honor society. I guess I'm just old school, one of those ol farts who look back with rose colored glasses at the old days