Okay, I'll admit it. I'm old school (and old). I've always seen badge requirements as, well, requirements. When the badge insert said pick one of these three, well, I picked one. While I might have tweaked it slightly, like playing softball instead of baseball because I had a softball, I didn't figure that tennis is a game with a ball, so playing tennis is like baseball. When I joined some online Girl Scout groups and found that many people were "adapting" the badges much more in the manner of substituting tennis for baseball rather than substituting softball for baseball, I raised my eyebrows, but as someone else said, "there are no badge police", so I pretty much kept my mouth shut. Still, what happens to program integrity when "everyone" is "adapting" things too much?
For the record, I think much of today's Girl Scout program is overly idealistic and aimed more at grant writers than at girls. I've made my opinions about
Journeys and
TAPs well-known on this blog, so I won't mention them here, but I will say that it seems to me, based on things I've read and the badge requirements themselves, that one of the goals of the program writers was to get girls out of their meeting rooms and into the community, or, at the least, to get leaders to bring the community to the meeting. Many of today's badges, in the badge packet requirements, ask the girls to visit someplace, or to speak with an expert on something.
