yes, camping is fine. yes, every day a good deed is fine. yes, friendship is fine. yes, having some discipline is fine. unfortunately, i can't help it, i don't want uniforms, ranks, flags and other military detail for my child. i think you can get the pros without need to bear the cons. makes me even more left than i already am, i know.
I feel sorry for you child. Sadly there are people like you running around the town I live in trying to have dodge ball banned, fighting to stop score from being kept during athletic events and making sure there are no losers, EVERYONE IS A WINNER!! We are becoming a nation of whiners, self indulgent narcists and entitlement feeling jerks. You should move to Canada.
I wouldn't feel sorry for his child, the world needs followers. OTH, I might ask my kid what he thinks, shouldn't let a kids thoughts get in the way of what the parents want. (sarcasm).
you mix up quite a variety of issues. IMO we live in an over-competitive society in a destructive sense of the word "competitive". ambition is a wonderful thing and it is very fine to have competitive games - yet i do not find it positive for forming a character if you start with that too early. i would think that after a period of "i want i can" there should come a phase of "we". now if you have been trained since early childhood that you need to be one and always one, you might find that not attractive at all. my child learned to calculate addition and subtraction while teeth brushing. i simply tried to keep her busy for two otherwise boring minutes. she learned quite quickly, but it was a game situation, nothing ambitious or competitive at all. actually quite funny you are bringing this up so quickly. i find overcompetitiveness and overambition the biggest killers of creativity. which in my eyes is the biggest gift of mankind.
i think it is the exact opposite. you seem to have a much worse opinion about human beings than i have. like you need to train them being tough and rough early on to give them an edge. while in fact the average joe out there has a computer in his head exceeding by far what is achieved in our machinery. yet he is so absorbed with daily business that his joyous creativity is near to being extinghuished. assisting development instead of pushing it creates inidividuals ... not followers.
that always makes me shiver in disgust. there is a strong difference between "excel yourself not others" and your line. in fact this everyone'sawinner thing is taking the exact same position of the overcompetitive game, it just puts it upside down. and, yes, this is just whining. i agree on that one.
The "cons"? I wonder how this would go over if you told Hirohito, Hitler or Mussolini you twisted wacko. Maybe you could write this up on some toilet paper in your concentration camp cell? Knocking the military is to have no concept of how the world works. Millions died to give you the ability to even freely post. And I am a centrist on the military. But you are a chip on the shoulder looking for someone to push it off. And don't worry, I have no interest in reading your response.
You sound like a coward. It's pansies like you who used to cut and run to Canada when their draft number was called.
"assisting development instead of pushing it creates inidividuals ... not followers." Actually, the uniform (couldn't we call it a dress code rather than refer to it as military) assists in the development of the individual. The uniform takes away the individuality yet at the same time forces the individual to set himself apart from all of his look alike counterparts through character/learning achievments. As far as badges and flags, clearly a merit approach, a carrot without the stick, improves self-esteem, through accomplishment. Just for the record though, I was never in the boy scouts, I couldn't handle any authority at any age although I'm sure I would survived without any major psychological damage from wearing a uniform or a badge as a boy scout.