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Comment by ocschwar | Hacker News Reader

Who could have guessed that growing up in a Polynesian culture is a better preparation for such a thing than going to an English boarding school..

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You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up. Now (well, 60 years ago) that he has been debunked, we should accept the evidence, not invent arbitrary reasons why it doesn't apply. Especially since the boys in question were "Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa."

You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up.

William Golding was my father's English teacher at school (prior to publication of Lord of the Flies). According to my father, when people talked to Golding at the time, it wasn't based on real children but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of.

> [...] but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of.

Also Known As "[...] but in fact he made it all up."

I take it as a morality tale that applies to all of humans generally and less an indictment of a specific age range. But I may be in the minority it seems.

I think that's clearly the way to interpret the novel. The idea that you could even debunk a piece of allegorical fiction is silly. It would be like trying to make a point by claiming that the tale of the scorpion and the frog was made up, or The Metamorphosis.

Wow, it's almost as if we were dealing with a piece of fiction.

Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island.

Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies.

But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.

'Lord of the Flies' was written at least partly as a reaction to the overly idealist 'The Coral Island'.

He certainly hasn't been "debunked" with a single counterexample, especially one from an entirely different non-Western culture. N=1 isn't a statistically significant sample in any case.

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