Michael de Percy's Spectator Australia piece, linked below, argues that Australian schools no longer educate boys. They disarm them. The adult version of the same reflex is a system that treats a man's physical competence as suspect on sight.
He starts from the numbers. In March 2026 Education Minister Jason Clare opened an inquiry into the boys' gap and noted that at least one in three Year 9 boys could not read to the NAPLAN baseline. A Queensland University of Technology study of 71,955 NSW public-school students found exclusions peaking in Year 9, boys twice as likely as girls to be excluded once and more than ten times as likely to be excluded sixteen times or more. Homeschooling is rising, and in NSW boys now slightly outnumber girls. Mothers he has spoken to are tired of a system that advertises inclusion and answers boyish disorder with suspension.
The rest is memoir used as argument. In 1980s Queensland he still got the cane. The replacement punishment was picking up rubbish in front of jeering peers, which he reads as humiliation rather than correction. At 14 the anger was just there. Grounding, football, band, running until the anger burned off, weights with his grandfather before school, a late decision to cut the Angus Young hair and get a tertiary score. Four days after school he was a chainman on Cape York, surveying sites for RAAF Scherger, axe and brush-hook in hand, a hot VB and a roll-your-own outside a slaughterhouse on his 18th birthday. That, he says, was the moment he became a man. The men he copied were not harmless. Work hard, play hard. Capable of danger, and taught never to turn it on women. Rough play was the training, not the offence. His mother, grandmother and great-grandmother taught the gentleman's side, including walking on the road side of a woman, a habit he still cannot break.
The diagnosis is what he calls suicidal empathy. Feeling has been pointed at the wrong target, so the society accepts real harm in order to look kind. Liberal education and the Aristotelian mean are gone. Aesop's farmer and the viper would have warned against it. Boys are told to disarm for someone else's feelings, and the product is harmless men. Female teachers dominate primary schools, and only 38.5 per cent of secondary teachers are male, so the model student is a quiet girl and the boy is a problem. A boy given neither work, nor rough play, nor a hard man to imitate never arrives at adulthood. Harmless men cannot defend a country, and they weaken it from inside. That, he closes, is the civilisation being taken apart.
The case a friend reported from a sporting event in November 2025 is the same logic after the boy has grown up. A man was with his wife. She slipped. He reached for her, missed the shoulder, and caught her hair. Police saw the grab and arrested him on domestic-violence charges on the spot, though the wife said she had slipped. He spent three days in jail. The case, like a great many of these, was ultimately dropped. The arrest still counted toward the police domestic-violence record. De Percy's hard men were supposed to be dangerous only when necessary, and never against women. The institutional reply is to treat the intervention itself as the offence, sort the facts later, and keep the statistic either way.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/10/boys-are-no-longer-educated-they-are-emasculated/