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[edit] Proposal for changing the History section in the Scouting article

[edit] Origins

As a military officer, Robert Baden-Powell was stationed in India and Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. Since his boyhood, he was fond of woodcraft and military scouting, and therefore as part of their training, showed his men how to survive in the wilderness. He noticed it taught the soldiers independence, other than just following officers' orders by drill.^[1]

In South Africa in the Second Boer War Baden-Powell got besieged in the small town Mafeking against a much larger Boer army (the Siege of Mafeking)^[2]. In the United Kingdom the public followed his struggle to hold Mafeking through newspapers and when the siege was broken, Baden-Powell had become a national hero. This pushed the sales of a small instruction book he had written about military scouting, "Aids to Scouting". On his return to England he noticed the large interest of boys in this book, which was also used by teachers and youth organizations ^[3]. He was suggested by several to rewrite this book for boys, especially during an inspection of the Boys Brigade. This brigade was a large youth movement, drilled which military precision. Baden-Powell thought this would not be attractive and suggested that it could grow much larger when scouting would be used ^[4]. He studied other scheme's, parts of which he used for Scouting. In July 1906, Ernest Thompson Seton sent Baden-Powell a copy of his book The Birchbark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians. Seton, a British-born Canadian living in the United States, met Baden-Powell in October 1906, and they shared ideas about youth training programs.^[5][6][7].

In 1907 he wrote a draft called Boy Patrols. In the same year, to test his ideas, he gathered 21 boys of mixed social backgrounds and holding a week-long camp in August, on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, Dorset, England.^[8] 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.^[9]

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", but left out the military aspects and transferred the techniques (mainly survival) to non-military hero's: backwoodsman, explorers (and later on sailors and airmen) ^[1]. He also added innovative educational principles (the Scout method) by which he extended the attractive game to a personal mental education.

Scouting for Boys first appeared in England in January 1908 as six fortnightly installments, and was published in England later in 1908 in book form. The book is now the fourth-bestselling title of all time,^[10] and is now commonly considered the first version of the Boy Scout Handbook.^[11]

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.^[12]. However because of the popularity of his person and the adventurous outdoor game he wrote about so chatching, boys spontaneously formed Scout patrols and flooded Baden-Powell with requests for assistance. He encouraged them, and the Scouting movement developed momentum. As the movement grew, Sea Scout, Air Scout, and other specialized units were added to the program.