Great article.

Let your boys be boys, and be a bit like a boy yourself as to the consequences. It's far easier to apologise (or pretend to) afterwards than to seek permission and try to abide by endless rules.

...There appears a round criticism of the school yard in this article, which seems to miss the point a bit. Obviously kids in reality, spend the short end of the day confined in them thankfully. So the question is left begging; who is responsible for the play activity of boys. The answer is the parents.

...If parents don’t have the time and energy required to-invest in their boys need for masculine activity, then why? I have concluded that the school offers very little to a child that represents adventure, in any real sense. The school is of necessity, a very “structured” environment; and should be discounted out as fulfilling the real need of boys, to satisfy the developmental necessity for adventurous play.

...I personally cross the paths of many boys in community sport involvement, and have learned to fit boys into a scale of ability and need, when assessing them for physical demands of sport. But I maintain sport to be the most beneficial activity for boys in particular. I liken sports training, to a less structured school yard. The huge range of sporting activities available to children is a credit to the society we live in, and should be utilised by all parents with children. The problem to be solved is the available time parents have, to deliver their younger children in particular, to the sporting field, where within limits they may run “ragged”.

...For kids in Sydney, “Pro-Dive” are running specials for children as young as twelve, for a dozen lessons in scuba diving at a cost of a little over a hundred dollars. Now there is an adventurous life for a kid. But again, the parent must deliver the child, and often wait around for the lessons end. In many coastal areas, Scuba diving is run through the high Schools, as a sport.

...The list is almost endless for child adventure; but the available time to the parent is a big limitation; as the author pointed out in her article, with her move closer to the inner city, to achieve the necessary end.

Schools are now female institutions; at one graduation ceremony at Sydney University from a degree in Education less than 5% of graduands were male. A number of years ago the NSW Department of Education had a report on boys’ education shredded for fear it may weaken the advantages girls now enjoy. Given that setting how many female teachers either value or encourage “wild things”?

Education has become more sexist not less; all in the guise of ending sexism. What interests and motivates boys is discouraged. Wild things are seen as being bad. How many female teachers either understand or value how boys approach the world?

At one primary school my son’s class was asked to produce a scale model; my son did this and explained the scaling method he used. The models which gained good marks were those which were artistic but had no element of scaling in them. The scientific effort was ignored, the artistic one favoured.

What lesson is learnt? Don’t be effective just look good?

Shaw’s comments remain valid; the docile and compliant won’t bring about change. The docile can neither recognise nor respond to need.

Don’t criticise teachers and schools alone. The critical area for development in education is parental attitude

Good article Cassandra, but you need to go further.

The real area of feminisation is in the assessment process.

To start with, far too much is as a result of assignments. This is all home work, with computers & text books, as well as tutors & parents getting involved. No one has any real idea who's work is being assessed, or how much the student actually understands, retains & can use at the end of schooling.

This system suits the girls, who are more inclined to put effort into homework. In my family, my son was far too busy with sports to put much effort into assignments, where as his elder sister did very good work at home. With the same subjects studied, she achieved an OP3, against his PO6.

10 years later she couldn't handle half the math my son uses in his hobbies, & both the physics & chemistry are totally gone. The boy still has most of it.

In the old days of major closed book annual tests the aim was to find out how much the student had understood, & could apply. This is where the boys excelled. They may not be good at writing pretty assignments, but had understood the subject, retain this knowledge, & apply it

The feminists got all this changed on the grounds that some suffered with nerves, so did poorly in tests. They wanted the stress eliminated, or so they said. They were way ahead in the cunning department. They got the girl favouring assessments, with out the men even realising what was being done.

So now we have people [girls particularly] who can't handle stress, & don't understand their subject, topping the classes. They enter university with out a sufficient grounding in the hard subjects to handle the courses without a year or more put into getting them up to what should be high school standard.

This feminisation has destroyed our old system, put nothing worth while in it's place, but has got the girls into the majority of university places. QED, but heaven help us in the near future.

I echo the thoughts of others regarding the quality of this article with a few qualifications.

Males have instincts towards violence. These should not be encouraged less you enjoy an endless war scenario and find peace frightening.

Males have tendencies towards taking chances, doing silly things. Unless you want a dead son, these must be curbed.

Males encouraged to be 'wild things' are unlikely to follow artistic pursuits. Tarzan was not known for his paintings.

It's extraordinary that the author wrote an entire article about limits to children's naturally wild behaviour without once mentioning litigation. The creeping restrictions to children's play and general physical activity are motivated, not by a fear of wildness, but by a fear of being sued and bankrupted by what has become a litigation monster.

And it's not just children. The physical freedoms of the whole of society are also being curbed by crippling personal liability insurance, suffocating health and safety regulations and a ridiculous dependency on security apparatus, all supposedly in order to feel 'safe'.

If people want to fret about their poor little sons' oh so natural testosterone wildness being cramped and tethered, perhaps we need to seriously curb the testosterone-induced wildness of the legal predators and fear-mongering media and politicians who have created this monster.

I too echo posters who enjoyed the article but have reservations. I think it is very important to allow boys and men to be themselves, and I think there has been a very deliberate and systematic campaign to prevent that. My issue has to do with your conclusion that the only people who ever get things done are basically jerks.

"How many stories of success are punctuated with episodes of failure, loneliness and loss, that could only be sustained by someone who is seen as unreasonable in the eyes of joiners and sharers."

"All progress depends on the unreasonable man."

This is basically "nice guys finish last" reasoning. Actually, my biggest problem with your article is that I fear you may be right. I, for example, wasted years of my life thinking, as I had been taught by my Christian upbringing, that the way to attract a female partner was to be kind, helpful and caring. It was only when I finally discovered that the opposite was true that I was able to do so. (Not that I was merely being nice to get laid- I genuinely cared and thought that if I was kind, people would be kind back.) Likewise with my career, I used to think that it was an ability to work with others that was key to success, but again I discovered that the opposite was true when, tired of continually being made to feel like a loser, I selfishly pursued my own interests. In a couple of cases this was very much to the detriment of others, but it lifted my soul to heights never before reached.

The thing is, at first this devotion to selfishness meant that I could finally genuinely be compassionate to others as my needs were finally genuinely being met. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder why I should even bother to do so, when it appears the only way to get respect and admiration in the first place is to "not care what other people think." As a result, I find I am being more and more uncaring. To the extent that I do behave reasonably, it is only to ensure that I don't lose all my friends, lose my job, or go to jail. But if I think I can get away with something, I will.

The sad irony, according to your logic, is that I may very well achieve something which benefits a world for which I do not care. I think often of Beethoven who brought so much beauty into a world which he shunned.

I must say I think you have taken up your stance more out of concern for the welfare of the non-female being you spat from your vagina than any genuine welfare for males. You sound like you were perfectly callous toward male needs before nature changed your circumstances. Ironically, I used to genuinely care about the needs of females before I found a female mate. Now I consider their feelings with disdain, because that is what it took to attract one. You can rest assured I will eye off your teenage daughter unabashedly and try to get her to suck my c0ck when she turns 18. I admire your commitment to raising wild things. Only, be careful what you wish for.

Bizarre.

Interesting though. Get some help me thinks there's enough material there for an entire conference.