According to Scouting’s educational philosophy, each person is born with a unique potential which can be developed in a constructive direction. Making this potential a reality involves developing all of one’s capacities - physical, intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual - in the direction of the goals to be achieved. Evidently, as education is the work of a lifetime, Scouting cannot fully develop anyone’s potential in all areas. Scouting can simply accompany each Scout, for a time, along that person’s path of development and help each person to develop the inner resources he or she will need to continue to develop without Scouting’s help. After all, if Scouting were a crutch on which people relied all their lives, it would certainly have failed in what it is trying to achieve. 

Scouting, therefore, simply seeks to make a contribution to this process of self-education during the years when a person can truly benefit from its structured educational support system. The age range for which Scouting can most benefit young people corresponds approximately to the second decade of life.  

By encouraging young people to use and develop all of their capacities in a constructive way today, Scouting seeks to help young people to realise that they have within themselves what it takes to already make a difference - to their own lives and to the world in which they live. As they become ready to expand their horizons and seek new challenges, Scouting helps them to use their experience and to further develop their capacities to live and grow as fulfilled individuals and as active and constructive members of society. Whether or not a person will actually develop that potential depends, amongst other factors, on the presence of a supportive, structured environment during the formative years which stimulates the young person to bring out of him or herself - and develop - what is constructive, to the detriment of what is destructive. Scouting seeks to offer young people such an environment.