Reddit reviews The Real Diary of a Real Boy

> Compared to my father, I don't know what real bullying was. And my father, compared to his grand father, probably didn't know what real bullying was either....But my point is overall, from the 100-year-view, progressivism has had a massive good impact.

I think this is a really interesting question, but I'm not sure how we resolve our debate. My thinking is that your father's experience was more an of an outlier and that cruel, sadistic bullying really was not that common fifty or a hundred years ago. I believe this mainly from my own family history and from reading lots of biographies and stories of people growing up a hundred years ago. There seems to be lots of fighting, but more of the kind that young boys actually find enjoyable. From a utilitarian perspective, the median young boy probably like playground fighting a lot more than modern bureaucratized, feminized schooling. My image of 1870s New Hampshire is of something close to what is described in Henry Shute's semi-fictionalized story The Real Diary of a Real Boy. Sounds like a pretty great time to be a boy.

The worst stories seem to come out of orphanages and boarding schools. You would need to compare the experience of orphanages to modern foster care, which itself seems pretty horrible. As for boarding schools, I'm not sure what to think about them. Boarding schools were intended for building a strong elite -- if you can't take the hazing you probably should just drop out because you are not leadership material. On the other hand having a bunch of boys living together might be an inherently bad social structure, leading not just to healthy hazing but senseless cruelty. The proper social structure may be that teenage boys should already be apprenticing in adult society, not learning from other teenage boys.

But for your average boy, growing up in a normal family and school, sadistic bullying does not seem that common. However, it is hard to get a representative sample. We don't have good surveys. Stories and memoirs usually either have an idealized version of the past or focus on the worst of it (since that makes for the most compelling stories).

Perhaps the best we could do (though this would be a lot of work) is to find the biographies of 100+ 19th century intellectual types -- inventors, writers, artists -- and read about their life growing up, and do an actual count of how often pathological behavior was experienced (how many faced sadistic bullying? how many saw their father sadistically beat their mother? etc.)