"Peter Clinch" wrote in message
...
Ewan Scott wrote:
Snip

Beyond
that I'm very happy to learn skills but have very limited interest in
owning a piece of paper that tells me what I'm capable of doing.

Maybe that's a cue for a new thread... :-)

Here we go...

I do regard the achievement awards as a very mixed blessing (coaching
awards are different if you'll need a regulated framework, which in a
lot of cases we do, I'm just talking about achievement awards here).
While on the one hand they will encourage many people, especially
youngsters, to get on and get their badge (and some skills with it!) I
am rather worried about the other side of the coin, which is closing
things off to people who *don't* have x number of stars.

A background more in mountaineering than paddling is probably a major
factor here, where there is more accent on personal freedom than in
paddle sports (not that there isn't one in paddling, just not IMHO quite
as accented). The Mountaineering Council of Scotland (the
mountaineering equivalent of the SCA) are actually specifically
*against* personal achievement awards to prevent the "you can only climb
on this crag if you have at least such and such award" approach coming
into being. The British Mountaineering Council tried to introduce
formal achievement awards a couple of years ago, and they got a lot of
very angry reaction from their established membership which caused them
to drop the idea.

The ethos in mountaineering is that you set your own limits, and if you
get it wrong then you take responsibility for your own actions and
mistakes.

That may well change from the bottom up. In DoE and in Guides and Scouts,
and I suspect in Cadets and Woodcraft folks (do the BB still do anything?)
we will find that there are indeed restrictions imposed on where we can and
cannot go. -it does vary between organisations - but the trend, supported by
the MLTB, is towards qualifications. certainly for leaders and instructors,
it is only a matter of time before they start telling us that we can't walk
up Criffell incase we fall of. How we fall off I'm not too sure. We all take
responsibility for our own mistakes, but sometimes others blame us for
theirs and whilst a piece of paper doesn't proove anything really, it is
what the system requires.

I know what you are saying, I empathise,I even agree. But then again,
coaching isn't (sadly) about teaching kids to paddle for fun, it is about
teaching a system to win medals at the Olympics and heck, we can't have any
old Tom, Dick or Harry doing that don't you know, old chap :-)

snip

Having said all that, I remember how I was often driven as a child not
to have a particular skill set, but to have the badge that represented
it sewn onto my tracksuit top! I'm very different now, but not to
acknowledge the use of an award like a BCU * in getting people motivated
to learn skills would be very shortsighted.

In summary, I want them to be there for people who want them and value
them and gain by them, but I don't want them being used to restrict
access to water. In the increasingly blame-driven, litigious, formally
risk-assessed society we live in that will be increasingly
problematical, and it bothers me :-(

That extreme would bother me too. Except that the learning curve for me has
been dictated by the BCU Star system from the get go.

Ewan Scott