We see a continuing pattern in schools, where the simple urges and fascinations of boyhood are considered too dangerous to be allowed:
Boys fantasize of conflict, they love to test their strength against their fathers in mock fights, they’re aggressive, and daydream about battle. Many of the games they prefer involve death and destruction. While this may seem like a horrible thing, this is actually a positive.
Boys need to learn to be dangerous. In fact, they need to be encouraged to be so. It should be understood that being dangerous is not a bad thing. The bad comes when the boy has not properly been taught how to utilize the dangerous aspects of his nature for good. When he has been taught to embrace the dangerous parts of himself, he becomes the man society relies upon to uphold it.
He will go on to become a good protector of his family, a police officer, or a soldier. These dangerous aspects also help him to become more confident in himself. He doesn’t back down from conflict, be it in the office, or in the home. He is the good, dangerous man, and he is a pillar of society.
But it starts with the early years, when the boy is naturally starting to discover this dangerous side of himself. Sadly, we are teaching boys that they are somehow dysfunctional for doing what comes naturally.
As Christina Hoff Sommers goes over in her “War on Boys” video for Prager U, “girl behavior is the gold standard in schools. Boys are treated like defective girls.” We medicate boys when they become too kinetic for schools to tolerate, drugging them into sitting quietly.
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As “Wild at Heart” author John Eldredge so eloquently summarizes the good, dangerous man, “Yes, a man is a dangerous thing. So is a scalpel.”
The thing that strikes me is that “dangerous” pursuits for boys are not disappearing, but becoming limited to a subset.
I was a nerdy boy; I spent a lot of my time in my bedroom reading books and learning to program an 8-bit computer, I played D&D and wargames with my friends.
And yet… I still went out in the evenings for casual soccer with my classmates. We still rode bikes into the country to find conkers, or just to hit dangerous speeds down steep hills.
I get the (possibly false) impression that while some boys still do those things, someone like me just wouldn’t; the divide in “types” of boys has become sharper.
Anomaly UK has it right. The dangerous childhood is still there but I think a lot of parents cut the danger out. I do think there’s a reduction in independence for girls as well as for boys.
In our time living in Seattle there were few kids on the street or out on their bikes. Videogames seem to have taken over. There’s much less kid park culture and more playdates and organized sport than in my (British) childhood.
We made a choice to give out kids outdoor lives and it seems to be working so far.
If we’re to raise these kinds of men, we must become intolerant of today’s intolerance of boyhood.
Of course, today’s regimented, feminized, and deeply corrupt society doesn’t want the sort of “good, dangerous” men the article describes, and would prefer that men, too, be drugged into sitting quietly.