All excellent points. And, in addition, you get many other beneficial side effects: improved sense of balance and body awareness, situational awareness, realistic appreciation of how dangerous fighting is and how easy it is to get hurt, stamina, and more.
I could support kids learning boxing if it was limited to body blows. With what we are learning about concussion, it seems to be more and more understood that blows to the head are never OK. Maybe you still need to teach defense against head blows, but they should probably not be allowed in competition. Getting battered in the head until you cannot stand up or respond should be right out.
In principle, I want to agree. In practice, I think the vast majority of martial arts schools are nothing more than glorified day care facilities with a side of calisthenics.
They don't constructively do anything to actually teach those issues of control and discipline to the students. It's not enough to give people the skills and then expect them to learn from experience the restraint necessary to not use it. They don't do anything at all to prepare their students for the realities of what it means to use violence against another human being. It is an emotionally traumatizing experience.
Nothing like that was ever mentioned in any of the schools across multiple styles that I attended. All that was discussed was the potential of an "unfair" legal ruling if your attacker decided to press battery chargers against you. There was always an implication of "be careful when looking for a place to use these skills", not "avoid it completely, except on completely unavoidable threat to life and limb."
I can't disagree, but I offer I hope an amusing counterpoint I heard from my uncle. It was Korean war or earlier and during basic training they were learning bayonet fighting. One soldier protested and said he did not need to learn bayonet fighting as a knife wound to the ass is not fatal.
My counterpoint being, it's good to know the skills but avoidance when possible is best.
not sure how anyone can recommend boxing now ; all those interactions require the right social environment, things can go wrong quickly. I reflect on learning about places in the USA where they take wrestling seriously, which at the time seemed like low-income, blue collar sort of places.. but now I realize that the social interaction between men there was rugged, but they had norms and ways to regain equilibrium. Meanwhile multi-cultural urban school, really a bad idea to have regular and repeated situations where students strike others, IMHO.
I'm just thinking back to my time in scouting and can only imagine what it would be like to teach a bunch of 14-16 y/os the 1920s equivalent of MMA. Probably about 30min of fun until kids just start hitting each other as hard as they can with sticks.
Still sounds more fun than the basket weaving merit badge though.
Hey man, my first year at summer camp all I did was basket weaving, leather working, and pottery. I originally planned to do swimming and some other adventurous stuff but was too overwhelmed by the swim test to be allowed in the lake and had a bit of a meltdown before changing course. I spent the whole week chilling in camp or the crafting grove working with my hands - it was great.
A few years later I went to a different summer camp as a senior patrol leader and finally got my swimming badge along with canoeing and rock climbing - that was a great week too. Point being: there's value in the "boring" stuff, maybe even more so now that I'm established in my career and looking for a little more peace these days. Lately I've been strangely interested in weaving and am thinking of making a simple loom - maybe this goes back to my basket weaving experience when I was 10?
Did you do basket weaving? Basket weaving was super chill and could make you feel like an adult in some important ways. My baskets were a disaster but talking to friends about favorite video games while weaving them was like free therapy.
> Probably about 30min of fun until kids just start hitting each other as hard as they can with sticks.
BB gun fights were a regular feature of childhood where and when I grew up. I never took part myself - my mom had already instructed me in the correct use, care, and safe handling of actual firearms, for one thing, and for another I knew she'd take my own Daisy air gun away if she heard of me doing anything so foolish - but lots of kids I knew did, and regularly had the injuries to prove it. Their folks never fussed so far as I knew.
That was in the late 80s and early 90s. So I feel like in the 1920s kids hitting each other with sticks is going to be about 50% "builds character," and the balance "well, it'll help get them ready for the next war".
Hey, basket weaving and leather work were super fun, and I have all cool ones like shotgun, archery and rifle. The most boring are probably your citizenship badges. Don't knock it till you try it.
I get it but when I took martial arts as a kid it didn’t devolve into a free-for-all so I guess it would depend on the effectiveness of the teacher to maintain order.
Some merit badges involve strenuous physical challenges, such as hiking (multiple long-distance hikes including a 50-miler). The canoeing MB requires learning how to get back on an overturned canoe while in deep water, which is bloody hard.
They still have badges for shooting and archery, too.
There are also some badges that were unexpected - plumbing, fixing farm equipment, computer game design.
I remember getting my computer badge- in the late 90s, iirc. I had to write up a document in a word processor, create a simple spreadsheet, and one or two other things I'm probably forgetting. Even then it felt a bit basic and behind the times, but I was happy to get an easy badge!
Ah yes, the canoeing merit badge. Accomplished by yours truly and one other scout because I found an underwater stump in the Sewanee river and told him about it. LOL.
I had a habit of collecting unusual merit badges that few had seen before: Animal Science (hey, it's got a cow on the badge, and besides I had cows), Atomic Energy, etc. I got my Entomology merit badge at the National Scout Jamboree from a team of highly motivated active duty Soldiers who had the job of eradicating potential disease vectors from areas where our troops would live and work, even during wartime. They were so happy I stopped at their little booth — I'm guessing the majority of Soldiers treated them like the bulk fuel folks (or other unsung jobs) rather than the people who keep you from contracting some horrific tropical disease.
The head of the team was a full bird colonel with a PhD from IIRC Cornell who revelled in the fact that .mil is exempt from EPA regs. They got to use the heavy artillery of insect control means. He flatly stated, with no small amount of pride, that not a single Scout at the National Jamboree that year would get Lyme unless they went into the (untreated) woods. My father was a staff physician for the Jamboree, and as best as he could tell the colonel was right — now, they did have Lyme infections from kids going decidedly "off piste", this being Fort AP Hill, VA, in the summer.
The lifesaving merit badge was the hardest for me. Lots of swimming and you have to lift a weight out of the deep end of the pool. Didn't help the camp that we did it at was at a high elevation in Colorado.
Unfortunately I didn't stick with it long enough to go on any of the famous backpacking trips. That being said, Boy Scouts was a valuable experience that offered some cool experiences no other organization offers around that age.
Hiking requires one 5-mile hike three 10-mile hikes, one 15-mile hike and one 20-mile hike.
None can be overnight.
The Backpacking MB requires a 30 mile trip over at least 3 days or nights (3 overnight stops).
None require a 50 mile hike, though there is a “50 mile” award that requires at least 50 miles over 5 days with no motor vehicles. Some troops (units) make a 50 mile trip compulsory in order to attend the High Adventure base trip (e.g. Philmont.)
I am most impressed that the grappling techniques are almost all legitimate and taught today. I tapped people out with two of those techniques (cross collar choke and arm bar) in the last week as a BJJ practitioner. Same with the throws. The scissor takedown is also known as Kani Basami and is stupid dangerous for the person being taken down. Can easily tear knee ligaments and most gyms do not permit its use in most circumstances. It is effective, though.
1925 in Great Britain? So, this was published just a few years after the end of World War I. I presume it was written by people who actually fought in the war. I wonder how much of this reflected the skills they had learned or used as soldiers in that war?
> I wonder how much of this reflected the skills they had learned or used as soldiers in that war?
Even today, Marine recruits are trained to fight with pugil sticks and padding — part of the idea is to get them accustomed to being hit without losing focus on the mission.
Sparring with quarterstaff is a bad idea, regardless of age. A 7' lever is no joke.
Anyone who thinks that's a hot take, infantilization of kids, politically motivated, or whatever else has been going on in this thread should probably watch e.g. https://youtu.be/3bmcpjBO4a0?t=270
The photos at the tops of the the second two links are great. All the sailors in the last one, facing off in lines with their stick-swords, and the dudes in boater hats posing with their sticks like they're LARPers who accidentally put on a costume for the wrong setting, at the second link.
Holy smokes! Reading this over, I'll bet there were more than a few injuries among the groups that practiced it.
Imagine sending your kid off for a fun weekend and then watching them come home Sunday morning with an acute elbow injury from an arm bar...
Scouting was dangerous enough without that stuff. You could get lost and even die in any number of unexpected ways. I watched a friend take a full swing of a wood axe to the top of his head. It didn't make any of us stronger or more interested in the outdoors. Plus everybody told us the Eagle Scout looked amazing on a resume when you become an adult, but they didn't mention that it could have the complete opposite effect depending on where you're applying...
Edit: I see the typical pro-danger, pro-learning-through-injury realism-posturing replies, but these quick takes are inappropriate for beginners, which merit-badge-earning scouts definitely are.
Sheesh. Some of the best things I ever did involved the risk of getting hurt. And yes, I guess I could see someone very left-leaning hating on an Eagle Scout but it would still probably be rare thankfully.
Part of learning to defend oneself is getting injured along the way. It's part of the learning process. You can't learn to fight by reading a book about it. If you start to participate and learn through that participation, sometimes your efforts (or someone else's) will lead to injury.
As a Scoutmaster for 7 years I introduced the axe and other subjects to over 200 11 year-old boys without a single injury other than 2 semi-minor burns.
I, OTOH, suffered an ascending aortic dissection that terminates in my left iliac. I survived (obviously), but it did stop me from e.g. Philmont afterwords.
Grew up playing hockey and just assumed the point of having children was to set them against one another for sport. It's as though nobody here is from Canada. Did you not have lawn darts, potassium nitrate, and licorice cigars? I was a generation or so late to get a duelling scar, but grew up about 20miles from the site of Camp X (where we invented the CIA), and it seemed the american kids were given guns willy nilly where here it was just expected you would use the tools at hand to plan a night mission take them yourself in the event of an invasion. I'm a bit out of the loop as I have only recently become an uncle, but presumably a boy today can at least still have a pet bobcat?
Between all the sugar cereals and cartoons, it's a wonder the people of the US aren't speaking Canadian...
[+] [-] jvanderbot|3 years ago|reply
I am a firm believer in everyone studying _some_ martial art (player's choice).
For the following reasons:
- It teaches an insane amount of respect when two people have to hold themselves back to practice
- It teaches self-discipline, mostly in the long-forgotten art of keeping yourself from becoming so angry you cannot function with form.
- It gives a crazy amount of confidence to know you are at least a little bit prepared for bad situations
- It removes a lot of the panic instinct in all kinds of intimidating situations, from actual fights, to presenting to a review board.
- You quickly learn to operate through pain and discomfort and intimidation, even if you are not being actually injured (e.g., not actually sparring).
- Everyone should feel that they are legitimately their own first line of defense. Even if that defense is to create space and get away.
My sport was boxing. I'm a knowledge worker, still.
[+] [-] leephillips|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayboise|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|3 years ago|reply
They don't constructively do anything to actually teach those issues of control and discipline to the students. It's not enough to give people the skills and then expect them to learn from experience the restraint necessary to not use it. They don't do anything at all to prepare their students for the realities of what it means to use violence against another human being. It is an emotionally traumatizing experience.
Nothing like that was ever mentioned in any of the schools across multiple styles that I attended. All that was discussed was the potential of an "unfair" legal ruling if your attacker decided to press battery chargers against you. There was always an implication of "be careful when looking for a place to use these skills", not "avoid it completely, except on completely unavoidable threat to life and limb."
[+] [-] Isamu|3 years ago|reply
Not that I made my daughters full size wooden practice claymores or anything. I’m asking for a friend.
[+] [-] SapporoChris|3 years ago|reply
My counterpoint being, it's good to know the skills but avoidance when possible is best.
[+] [-] mistrial9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiernanmcgowan|3 years ago|reply
Still sounds more fun than the basket weaving merit badge though.
[+] [-] kjanssen|3 years ago|reply
A few years later I went to a different summer camp as a senior patrol leader and finally got my swimming badge along with canoeing and rock climbing - that was a great week too. Point being: there's value in the "boring" stuff, maybe even more so now that I'm established in my career and looking for a little more peace these days. Lately I've been strangely interested in weaving and am thinking of making a simple loom - maybe this goes back to my basket weaving experience when I was 10?
[+] [-] themodelplumber|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwanem|3 years ago|reply
BB gun fights were a regular feature of childhood where and when I grew up. I never took part myself - my mom had already instructed me in the correct use, care, and safe handling of actual firearms, for one thing, and for another I knew she'd take my own Daisy air gun away if she heard of me doing anything so foolish - but lots of kids I knew did, and regularly had the injuries to prove it. Their folks never fussed so far as I knew.
That was in the late 80s and early 90s. So I feel like in the 1920s kids hitting each other with sticks is going to be about 50% "builds character," and the balance "well, it'll help get them ready for the next war".
[+] [-] dctoedt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EVdotIO|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcheong|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|3 years ago|reply
They still have badges for shooting and archery, too.
There are also some badges that were unexpected - plumbing, fixing farm equipment, computer game design.
[+] [-] fishtoaster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graywh|3 years ago|reply
the sum total of all the required hikes is 70 miles: 5, 10, 10, 10, 15, 20
[+] [-] aerostable_slug|3 years ago|reply
I had a habit of collecting unusual merit badges that few had seen before: Animal Science (hey, it's got a cow on the badge, and besides I had cows), Atomic Energy, etc. I got my Entomology merit badge at the National Scout Jamboree from a team of highly motivated active duty Soldiers who had the job of eradicating potential disease vectors from areas where our troops would live and work, even during wartime. They were so happy I stopped at their little booth — I'm guessing the majority of Soldiers treated them like the bulk fuel folks (or other unsung jobs) rather than the people who keep you from contracting some horrific tropical disease.
The head of the team was a full bird colonel with a PhD from IIRC Cornell who revelled in the fact that .mil is exempt from EPA regs. They got to use the heavy artillery of insect control means. He flatly stated, with no small amount of pride, that not a single Scout at the National Jamboree that year would get Lyme unless they went into the (untreated) woods. My father was a staff physician for the Jamboree, and as best as he could tell the colonel was right — now, they did have Lyme infections from kids going decidedly "off piste", this being Fort AP Hill, VA, in the summer.
[+] [-] dingus24|3 years ago|reply
Unfortunately I didn't stick with it long enough to go on any of the famous backpacking trips. That being said, Boy Scouts was a valuable experience that offered some cool experiences no other organization offers around that age.
[+] [-] gonzo|3 years ago|reply
None can be overnight.
The Backpacking MB requires a 30 mile trip over at least 3 days or nights (3 overnight stops).
None require a 50 mile hike, though there is a “50 mile” award that requires at least 50 miles over 5 days with no motor vehicles. Some troops (units) make a 50 mile trip compulsory in order to attend the High Adventure base trip (e.g. Philmont.)
[+] [-] mistrial9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitexploder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dctoedt|3 years ago|reply
Even today, Marine recruits are trained to fight with pugil sticks and padding — part of the idea is to get them accustomed to being hit without losing focus on the mission.
https://rp.marineparents.com/bootcamp/mcmap.asp
[+] [-] Dlanv|3 years ago|reply
The boxing and jiu jitsu perhaps.
[+] [-] eric4smith|3 years ago|reply
45 years later I can still mess with some of those knots!
Boy Scouts we’re awesome. Pity in the USA they are a little under attack now.
[+] [-] jessaustin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kod|3 years ago|reply
Anyone who thinks that's a hot take, infantilization of kids, politically motivated, or whatever else has been going on in this thread should probably watch e.g. https://youtu.be/3bmcpjBO4a0?t=270
[+] [-] hitovst|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corrral|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canne_de_combat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartitsu
(related to the first link—it's a martial art Sherlock Holmes is familiar with, in the Doyle stories)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlestick
The photos at the tops of the the second two links are great. All the sailors in the last one, facing off in lines with their stick-swords, and the dudes in boater hats posing with their sticks like they're LARPers who accidentally put on a costume for the wrong setting, at the second link.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|3 years ago|reply
Imagine sending your kid off for a fun weekend and then watching them come home Sunday morning with an acute elbow injury from an arm bar...
Scouting was dangerous enough without that stuff. You could get lost and even die in any number of unexpected ways. I watched a friend take a full swing of a wood axe to the top of his head. It didn't make any of us stronger or more interested in the outdoors. Plus everybody told us the Eagle Scout looked amazing on a resume when you become an adult, but they didn't mention that it could have the complete opposite effect depending on where you're applying...
Edit: I see the typical pro-danger, pro-learning-through-injury realism-posturing replies, but these quick takes are inappropriate for beginners, which merit-badge-earning scouts definitely are.
[+] [-] UberFly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prometheus76|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|3 years ago|reply
Everyone starts as a beginner and age doesn’t change that, except maybe by making things harder as you get older.
Do you object to the pacing or the starting age or are you imagining that the people teaching this were reckless?
[+] [-] throwawayboise|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eckmLJE|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gonzo|3 years ago|reply
I, OTOH, suffered an ascending aortic dissection that terminates in my left iliac. I survived (obviously), but it did stop me from e.g. Philmont afterwords.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nimbius|3 years ago|reply
Woke: My boys earning his arms merit badge in the boy scouts.
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
Between all the sugar cereals and cartoons, it's a wonder the people of the US aren't speaking Canadian...