Summary

Anonymous Boy Scouts and What They Do — Ivy Cottage (1913)

It is an extraordinary sight to walk into a classroom and see from thirty to forty small boys looking eagerly on while a teacher cuts up beef steak or neck of mutton, potatoes and vegetables for a camp stew. In this class they learn how to light a fire, which is not always the simple task it sounds; how to make "damper" of flour and water as they make it in the Australian bush; how to prepare and cook a rabbit, or a hotpot, or a soup. Forty boys attend this camp cookery class every week.
Then there is the leather workers' class, which, oddly is even more popular than the camp cookery class.
Source: Wikisource

Anonymous Boy Scouts and What They Do — Ivy Cottage (1913)

And when one sees schoolboys, especially in working-class districts, yawning drearily through geometry lessons and the like and rushing eagerly, even in their leisure hours, to classes in cookery, joinery, and handymanship, it makes one wonder whether these subjects might not with value be substituted for some of the more elaborate things a working-class boy is now taught—as a rule only to forget. For after all, it is these homely, useful arts rather than geometry that are likely to fall in his path in later life.
"The Daily Scout."
Source: Wikisource

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