Activities
Activities undertaken by cadets in the ATC are intended to provide experience and training in the skills and disciplines admired by the armed forces; however, instruction is designed to be useful to a teenager whether the cadet later chooses a military career or a civil one. The emphasis is on team work, leadership, physical fitness, discipline and the development of such virtues and talents as courage, dexterity and mental agility. Parade drill is taught and regularly practiced, outward bound activities such as hill walking and rock climbing are often available and community service is encouraged, in particular the Duke of Edinburgh's Award. Opportunities exist to learn rifle shooting and marksmanship, first aid and radio communications. Team sports such as rugby, football and netball, or more individual challenges such as orienteering and cross country running, often involve rivalry between squadrons. Adventure training gives a cadet the opportunity to develop the skills of initiative and leadership.
There are also opportunities for band music and many camps offer teenagers the chance to spend a week away from parents practicing fieldcraft or receiving instruction in gliding and other outdoor pursuits. Many of these activities, including gliding, have a well-defined scale of achievement that a cadet can work to build up; this includes the leadership qualities reflected in an NCO structure.
Read more about this topic: Uniform Of The Air Cadet Organisation
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
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“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
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“As life developed, I faced each problem as it came along. As my activities and work broadened and reached out, I never tried to shirk. I tried never to evade an issue. When I found I had something to doI just did it.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (18841962)