We hear much today about the “boy crisis, the “trouble with boys,” and a “war against boys.”

These problems are real. The lack of father figures and male mentors, the overwhelming predominance of female teachers in the early school grades, an obsession in many cases with video games, the prejudice of both the classroom and our society at large in favor of girls as opposed to boys – all these are reasons boys are floundering while their female counterparts ride the success wave.

But there’s one more explanation for this phenomenon of broken boyhood: a lack of real heroes. In times past, teachers and parents introduced adolescent males to heroic men, whether fictionalized characters like Ulysses, Sir Galahad, and D’Artagnan and his Musketeers, or historical figures like Richard the Lionheart, Winston Churchill, and for that matter, Moses and Jesus Christ.

I was introduced to figures like these through “Classics Illustrated,” a comics series I found in Weatherwax’s Pharmacy of Boonville, NC, at the age of seven. That series influenced my imagination and developing code of morality and manhood. Add the “Childhood of Famous American” series, the Hardy Boys, some of the Landmark books, and many other assorted juvenile works of history and literature, and by sixth grade the foundation of my notions of the heroic were well-established.

William Jones Jr., author of “Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History,” had a similar experience with these comics based on historical events and great literature. It was 1956, and the five-year-old William was with his father picking up a prescription at Hall Drug Store. There he spotted a comic book in a spinner rack with a picture of Davy Crockett on the front. His father bought him that comic, and from that moment on William became enamored with “Classics Illustrated,” writing, “Nothing else I read as a child had as significant an impact on my developing imagination….”

Unfortunately, we live in a time when heroes are toppled, sometimes literally, from their pedestals, or else are blighted, judged by their flaws rather than their virtues and courage. Men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, and others from the South are, for example, considered first and foremost as drivers of slaves rather than of the nation. Teachers and the so-called “progressives” of our culture point to the evils of colonialism wrought by Columbus, the flaws in Abraham Lincoln’s sometimes ambiguous stances on slavery, and so on.

This debunking of heroes has left boys with two categories of figures for emulation: superheroes and celebrities. Both categories contain their own flaws in serving as examples of heroism. Superheroes, for example, aren’t real. Spiderman may embody virtue, but his power comes from the bite of an arachnid, not from human travail. He’s not even as real a fictional hero as Dickens’ Sydney Carton. As for sports figures and movie stars, they dominate the public square not by their good character, but by their talent. They frequently make poor exemplars for young boys.

C. S. Lewis was spot-on regarding today’s culture when he wrote, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.”

So, what is a hero? The best definition I know comes not from a dictionary, but from Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech. Here is the two-sentence gold nugget that dispenses with today’s cynics and delineates a hero:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; rowho errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

That man in the arena may be a politician sticking up for the truth, a soldier bleeding on a forlorn battlefield, an entrepreneur fighting for all he’s worth to keep his business afloat, a husband and father who gives his all for his wife and children. It might also be that teenager who breaks up a fight rather than filming it on his phone, who refuses to join others in his class in cheating on a test, who defends the good and the true at the risk of mockery.

Instill this “man in the arena” heroism in our sons by way of example and by stories, and they’ll become better students, better workers, better husbands, and better fathers.

In short, they’ll become better men.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Unsplash