Description
In his 1905 Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship, British Lieutenant General Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the World Scouting movement, wrote that the form of scouting he envisioned should be understood as separate and distinct from military scouting and he railed at the suggestion by some of his contemporaries that he was, in effect, advocating the martial training of boys. But though he denied he was doing so, he nevertheless made clear he would see no harm in it and, in fact, offered what reads as a spirited defence of a fostered military ethos. Under the heading “Militarism” and with direct reference to what he described as the characteristics of soldiers, he went on to extol the virtues of instilling, among other things, discipline, self-sacrifice, deference to orders, and loyalty to officers. Baden-Powell wove this together with direct appeals to militarist ideation around war preparation as lamentable but necessary to meet the anticipated threats of a presumed dangerous world. This paper traces parallel ideas and commitments through a range of contemporary (para)military organizations for children, developing conceptual distinctions between recruitment, pararecruitment, and perirecruitment (that is, efforts toward recruitment of the eventual adult through the present child).
