I find the same thing.  My Cubmaster is even the Service Unit Manager for our local Girl Scouts and she's of the same opinion so she tries to do as much as she can to enhance wherever possible.

My wife and I discussed this last night.  I think the GSUSA program just is too unstructured and lacks quite a bit of important things.  A specific example:

The Junior program for the GSUSA is for girls around the 4th and 5th grades.  This is roughly equivalent in age terms to our Webelos program.  Now in Cub Scouts, boys first learn the rules and properly handling of pocket knives in their Bear year, the year prior to this (roughly 3rd grade).  Since my whole family are Scouts (me obviously, my son Jon is a Webelos I now, my daughter Jessie is a Junior GS and my wife Jenny is both a Cub Scout leader on our committee and a Girl Scout leader), we all have pocket knives – except for Jessie.  So I get Jessica one.  I figure first I'm going to go over the knife safety guidelines in her handbook with her before she can use it.  So I grab the Junior Girl Scout Handbook, flip to the index, go to "K" and…nothing.  No knives listed.  I go to "P" thinking maybe it's under "pocket knives."  Nope.  Pocket Mirrors, yes.  Pocket knives, no.  So I check under "S" for Safety.  Aha!  Safety is definitely listed, but nothing about knives.  Tools?  I flip to that section.  Ms. Fit-It, it's called.  And it talks about all the different tools that a girl should really have in her toolbox – hammer, screwdrivers, saw, plane, awl, pliers, wrench – but no knife.

The knife, aka the blade, aka the sharp or pointy edged rock.  The second most useful tool in all of recorded (and unrecorded) human history – second only to the rock – is not listed.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over?

I'm going to have to pull out Jon's Bear handbook to teach Jessie knife safety.  Actually, my Cubmaster is actually trying to get a day set up where myself and other BSA leaders will teach the Whittlin' Chit to all the Girl Scouts in the service unit.

I could go on, but it annoys me so much sometimes this might devolve into a rant…

Scouter_Garry said:

Scott – ROFL.  We had a Major in the AF  go through the same thing this year with  his Daughter after going to  a Survivor themed camp.  Maybe the GS cover knife safety  under  cooking or kitchen tools?  I don't know because my  two daisy daughters were told not to buy the book they wouldn't be using it… at all?

I think maybe the GSUSA version of knife safety might be, "Ask a man to do it for you."

Liberty said:

I had hoped the American Heritage Girls program would turn out to be something we could look into instead of Girl Scouts, but I'm afraid it won't be right for us, either.  I guess my daughter will just have to stick to learnin' from her big brothers for now.

That's too bad.  I was going to suggest to my daughter about switching to AHG but she is already on her 5th year of Girl Scouts so at this point we'll probably stick with it until she hits 14 and can join a Crew.  Though starting for this fall she's going to be a Juliet (GSUSA version of the Lone Scout program), and it appears that my wife is going to be the Juliet Coordinator for the service unit.  We'll see how that goes.

Jessica was considering doing the Bronze Award (kinda like the Arrow of Light) project as creating a badge program for knife safety (only for juniors and older, not brownies or daisies).  Our service unit manager told her that it's a great idea, but too ambitious for a Bronze Award project, she should save it for a Silver Award (highest award for the next level up, 6th and 7th grade I guess) project.  Apparantly the Bronze Award is more along the lines of "spend 10-15 hours cleaning up a local park" type of thing.