The article doesn't give too many details about what transformed them. A couple of things do stand out, though. The leaders seem to have responded to the boys' sissiness by making things more difficult for them, not easier. The turning point came when, on a hike in Alaska, the boys didn't want to pitch their tents, didn't want to hang their food up so as not to attract bears, didn't want to set up their latrines, and so on. So the leaders left them to themselves. The result was that they did organize themselves after all; they formed a team, and got the jobs done. After that, they were on their way.The article mentions, without delving into it, that a couple of the leaders were ex-military men; and it does seem that the leaders had especial fondness for pretty rugged hikes, hunting, mechanics, and suchlike. They didn't have the boys do macrame. And yet, because the boys were amongst themselves, and didn't have to care what anybody looking over their shoulder would think, they seem to have grown interested in things gentler than shooting moose: planting butterfly bushes, for example, or talking about Bergman films.
My emphasis. When do kids get any such time in our full school-day, day-care, programmed activity, helicopter parent, helmet and knee-pads required, first thing we do, let's call Child Protective Services world?
Another politically incorrect truth that the account illustrates is that, for the male, difficulty, whether intellectual or physical, brings hope; there are bruises that feel good, because they are the bruises of a real life, a real struggle. I'm not making any claim about young women here, except that I don't think that they die inside without some kind of arena, some agon, where you can win or lose, but at least lose fighting.There's a lesson there for our politics, too. The more the government gives us, the less happy anyone is going to be.
There's a bitterness in the easy, the silly, the pointless, and it's all the more dispiriting when it is combined, as it is in a lot of the school assignments I see, with imbecilic drudgery. A boy is that odd creature who, if he can't clear the low bar, needs to have it raised higher. But that counterintuitive challenge can only be issued under certain circumstances, by people who are motivated by love, and who know what they are doing. Usually that means you need a gang of boys, not just one, and a leader who knows more about them than he can even articulate, because he was once one of them.
