Learning For Life - History

History

During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, over 40 BSA councils organized innovative, non-traditional programs called In-School Scouting. These units were in public schools (usually in low-income neighborhoods), where the schools invited the BSA and other partner organizations such as the Girl Scouts of the USA and Camp Fire USA to provide Scouting programs as part of the school curriculum, usually for an hour a week during a daytime elective period. There were some critics who complained that these programs were innovative to the point of not being "real Scouting," and there were occasionally difficulties in maintaining partnerships between these youth-serving agencies in delivering school programs to both boys and girls. This led the BSA to explore options regarding delivery of youth programs in public school settings, and a two-year effort including grass-roots task forces lead to the development of Learning for Life, including its name.

The Learning for Life subsidiary was launched in 1991 by the BSA National Council to continue serving youth through public schools and educational organizations with specially developed curriculum separate from traditional Scouting, and with distinctive programs that no longer used traditional Scouting methods like the Scout Promise and Scout Law. Participants in Learning for Life programs would be open to both sexes at all program levels (unlike Cub Scouting (Boy Scouts of America) and Boy Scouting), which allows the BSA to provide in-school programs if the traditional girls' agencies are not able or willing to do so. All existing programs called In-School Scouting, as well as the large number of Career Awareness Explorer posts (where youth participation consisted primarily of career seminars during school hours) were rolled into Learning for Life. This had the immediate effect of dropping the membership totals of the BSA, but had no significant effect on the total numbers of youth served by the BSA when combining membership totals of traditional Scouting with the youth served totals of Learning for Life.

When a number of government agencies and community leaders began to seriously question the appropriateness of those agencies continuing to charter Explorer posts, BSA decided to reorganize the structure of Exploring programs. The decision was made in 1998 to separate work-based Exploring programs from those that were primarily focused on traditional BSA programming, hobbies, outdoors, and sports. The work-based Explorer posts and their membership was transferred to the Learning for Life subsidiary, and the posts that were traditional to hobbies, outdoors, and sports were renamed Venturing Crews and Sea Scout Ships, and remained as part of the traditional BSA organization. Both posts and crews continue to serve the same age-groups of young women and men ages 15–20, but over the years, the terminology and methods of the Exploring and Venturing programs have evolved in separate directions, with Exploring continuing in a very non-traditional direction.

Almost every one of the 294 BSA Councils has at least one Explorer post, and the majority have Learning for Life programs that are school-based groups. These groups and posts have youth who are described as participants and members of Learning for Life, but are not members of the BSA nor subject to membership restrictions such as gender requirements, other than minimum age requirements. The health and safety policies of Learning for Life are very similar to those used with BSA programs.