Always a scout? What kind of citizens do former scouts become? – Scouto

Cohorts of young people have experienced Scouting and Guiding in France since this educational innovation was launched there in 1911, four years after its conception by the British Army officer, Lord Robert Baden Powell. Many Scouts, Guides and their derivatives (Éclaireurs,...) claim the uniqueness of this outdoor experience in a small group of peers as they progress through a highly ritualised setting (camp, promise, totems, vigils/watches). It is common to find such indications in the biographies of illustrious politicians, artists or journalists of their passage through Scouting, spelled out in terms comparable to what can be said in ordinary conversations by former, more anonymous scouts: examples include ''[Scouting] has changed my life"," I learned about commitment and the collective life"," it has made me who I am: a lover of nature "...

Whilst taking seriously these biographical stories, without losing sight of their Subjectivity and silence of all those whom Scouting has disappointed or left indifferent, the project ScouTo - for "Scouts always? - seeks to explore the biographical impact of Scouting. What competences and knowledges acquired in Scout socialisation are valued in adulthood? The ambition of Scouting is to complete public education with a program of "training citizens by teaching them about life in the open air", according to the French translation of the original text. ScouTo's project material will, however, be less focused on the official programs or educational objectives of the different Scout movements than on the in-depth collection of information from the Scouts themselves. The aim is to build a scientifically based knowledge of the effects of Scout socialisation in order to discuss citizenship education issues more broadly.

In three successive and complementary phases, ScouTo aims to articulate the links between socialisation in Scouting and the adult development of former Scouts in France.

The first phase will consist of prosopographic work; by compiling fragmented studies mentioning passages between Scouting and adult commitments (political, humanitarian, associative, militant, religious...), by drawing upon the existing Scout archives, and by delving into the historiographical production of Scout associations, ScouTo will allow researchers to elaborate an inventory of the passages between Scouting and "adult worlds" throughout the past century. In addition, ScouTo will enable a mapping of the various Scout networks and their dynamism, thereby proposing novel materials and tools on the "Scout phenomenon" and its demography in France since 1911.

The second phase will be devoted to assessing the current empirical reality of the movements of individuals and the transfer of skills between Scouting and the five main networks highlighted in the previous stage. These testimonies of former Scouts, which will be filmed and recorded, will then be highlighted in an ethnographic film confronting these stories with filmed sequences presenting the current practices of Scouting in France. In doing so, this film will achieve two goals: to renew an iconography of scouting hitherto obsolete and largely dated (from the post-war years to the 1960s), and to initiate the final stage of the project, which will consist of mobilising a large panel of former scouts through the online broadcast of the film, and by prompting them to fill in a questionnaire about their own experiences.

The last phase will be devoted to a quantitative survey aimed at generalising the understanding of the socialising effects of Scouting, documented in the previous phases, based on an enlarged population (n=3000) and introducing structural variables (gender, level of education, social background, Scout career level, family trajectory, geographical factors). ScouTo's results and methodology could be remobilised in a comparable project on a European scale.