The worst I can say about that system was that it offered no solutions, and was a huge waste of time.

Going full paleo is literally a step back. The universe experiments. It seeks to evolve new ways of life. Much of our current way of living is clearly a mistake. Much of the old way of living was almost certainly a mistake, or we’d never have left it behind. There is no perfection, only exploration of possibilities in search of improvement.

This is why I favor individual freedom. Let every single human being run his own life as an experiment. Observe what works for others. This is the most efficient way to seek a way forward.

Yes, it’s uncontrolled experiments. Lots of variables. But still, make it up on sheer volume.

I always hated PE and organized sports but as a grade school kid enjoyed running around and general physicality, so the critique that says boys don’t get enough of this sounds more right to me than my physical appearance today might suggest to some. Even boys like me enjoyed some kind of exercise as kids. Many do enjoy the structure and rules of sports. Too much sitting is bad. Agreed.

I don’t agree with the occasional version of this that implies boys are just about brute physicality and will ultimately lose to girls in academics, or that boys need to be taught that academics are not girly. I’m old enough to remember that while there was always the physical/mental culture clash, there has always been a masculine place for the work of the mind and “traditional masculinity” has no need of correction here. Mens sano in corpore sano, even if I’ve flunked the latter.

Reading lists come up a lot, too. There is a point there. There’s plenty of written work by men about the lives of men that can challenge boys. Most of the corpus of human literature. Give them books by women about women, sure, but keep a balance. As early as the 80s, if my curricula hadn’t had mandatory Shakespeare most of my high school English reading would have been very feminine. There’s only so much enthusiasm the travails of a middle aged or aged woman on the Canadian prairie can evoke in a teenaged boy. The author in question is the late Margaret Laurence, for anyone interested. I’m glad I was made to read some of her work, as I’ve gotten older. It was a grind at 16. Thank God for Will S. and Julius Caesar.

I don’t know which of those is the most important. The nationality bit may be the least, or the time period.

Regardless of which, I marvel whenever I encounter pop culture or media discussion of the perils of high school, even in my own country.

I don’t mean to be flippant, either. I just genuinely don’t understand and had no personal reference points. I just went to school, I had a few friends, and did my thing. I realize I didn’t belong to a sexual or gender minority, but then I wasn’t exactly a teenage lothario or party animal either. Nobody bothered me, nobody hit me, nobody offered me drugs.

It was a good high school, but there was nothing upper class or otherwise out of the ordinary for Ontario in the 80s.

This, almost more than any other subject, makes me feel like a member of a alien culture when it comes up. Our media especially entertainment heavily implies everyone will be traumatized by high school.

For instance, white students completing high school increased from about 30% to about 70% from 1950 to 1980.

Let us do to the schools the inverse of decimation.

Aside from the gentle satire of Scientology, this was a serious take on this exact problem — evolutionary mismatch. There are of course several non-fiction works like John Durant’s The Paleo Manifesto that also seek to identify and ameliorate this mismatch.