Re: It must be hell to be sitting in his class...

"And perhaps boys would be the worst! Oh, wait, that was the whole point of the story, wasn't it?" No, it wasn't. It is entirely anachronistic to read modern gender politics into a novel published in 1954, and Golding made it quite clear in his other writings that he did not believe that males had a monopoly on bloodlust (See John Carey's biography). Furthermore, the novel makes abundantly clear that the boys represent humanity in microcosm. The adults would know what to do - so Ralph thinks. But at the end the surviving boys return to an adult world in the midst of its own bloody warfare. If the adults are needed as guardians of the kids, who is there to be the guardian of the adults? This is Cristian Bolocan's precise point in his essay The Father We Never Had; it is why he refers to humans as orphans and the future global superintelligence as the Father.