I'm a scout leader in my ward and one of the boys in my troop is getting his tenderfoot. At our weekly activity I was telling him he needed to have a board of review. So I had one of the other boys who recently had a rank advancement to tell him about it.

Boy #2 explains "They make you say the scout law and oath, and then Brother XXX will ask you what the most important point of the scout law is. The answer is "Obedience" if you don't say obedience then he will correct you and let you know that the most important thing a scout can be is obedient."

I tried to reason with the boys and talk about how all the attributes are important, with zero success. They were so set on having the "right" answer, they refused to see that being trustworthy or helpful or kind are just as/more important than blind obedience.

I really hate TSCC.

Groupthink, but you have sown seeds.
They're not as stupid as TSCC tries to make them.

FWIW, I'm a math teacher and I try to get across the importance of understanding HOW we got the answer we did, and WHY we did the steps we did.

Most of my students couldn't care less and just want "the right answer," and don't care if about knowing how to reach it.

But I do dislike the emphasis on obeying arbitrary rules set forth by old men in business suits being supported by the tithes of the masses.

The Common Core way of doing things does not take this into account, but that is keenly important.

I would probably have been your worst nightmare as a student. I always hated math in school, but loved just about everything else.

I always felt so bewildered when not only the teacher, but the other students seemed to take it for granted that it was perfectly obvious that A led naturally to B, which flowed seamlessly to C, and so on. I could never see that.

My most vivid memory of this was in my last year of required math: Geometry I in high school. I actually volunteered to write out a problem on the board. (I seldom did this, because I usually did not understand. But I had worked long and hard on this problem the night before, went over and over it, and KNEW it was right.)

Trouble was, I arrived at the right conclusion, but it took me 13 steps to get there, whereas everybody else got there in 7 steps. One of the other students, a jerk that I had known since elementary school, started giving me a lot of garbage about what I had written. So I took him on, very angrily: "Show me where I'm wrong! Is THIS step wrong? (It wasn't.) Is THIS step wrong?" and so on. The teacher cut in, saying in a very gentle voice, "None of the steps are wrong. You just got there by a different road, that's all."

A few weeks before the school year ended, the teacher had a conference with my mother and told her that I had virtually no more grasp of geometry now than I'd had at the beginning of the school year (though I had tried very hard.) He also told her that in his opinion, it would be a waste of time to force me to sit through another year of math, as I would not grasp it any better. Since I had straight A's in everything else, he said he would give me a passing grade so I could explore what else was out there.

To this day (and I'm a grandma now), I remember this sweet gentleman with gratitude. Something in my brain just could not make sense of numbers.

Research shows that many girls' brains mature and are more ready to take on advanced math around age 21-22. I had a hard time in high school, but ended up being quite competent when I went back to school at 30. That may have been part if the problem for you.

A Scout is

trustworthy: Don't tell your parents about our little game.

loyal: That new Scoutmaster, he doesn't love you the
way I do.

helpful: Come here Jr, do you mind helping me out with
something in my tent?

friendly: I'm just trying to be friendly.

courteous: Thank you sir, may I have another?

kind: Thanks for helping me with that problem, that
was very kind of you.

obedient: Don't question my authoritah.

cheerful: Smile and take it like a man.

thrifty: We do this in the woods and not a hotel room
because I am trying to save money.

brave: Be brave and it will all be over soon.

clean: Here's a rag clean that up, it's making me sick.

reverent: What we have is special and talking about it
would ruin it.

Jacob, if this scout in this scenario is or was you, or someone you know, please talk to someone you trust, a good friend, a doctor, aprofessor/teacher, about this. I don't know you or your situation, but hope you are ok.

Jacob, you have my sympathy.

For me, it was a Cub Scout leader.

And I still have only told one person (outside the pseudonymous internet) and was punished for lying about a moral and upstanding member of the community.

He was all about obedience.

Cornelius - can't you be involved some way without being a TBM? Couldn't you be a big brother or something? If you want to help young people, you can do it without being in TSCC. CarolY is right........you don't want to be the first course in the MTC training, do you? Tell the boys the truth about TSCC. That will get you out of that calling and out of TSCC too.

If you read about the NAZI era brownshirts, you'd find that obedience tops the list.