For well over 100 years children fantasized about going into outer-space.
Being Tarzan used to be pretty big too, but I doubt that any child ever learned much of anything from that, except stretching is imagination and THAT is almost a dead trait now.
"boys have played war games for millennia."
Something that teaches an array of survival skills and prepares them for very real possibilities.
"For well over 100 years children fantasized about going into outer-space."
Which also turned out to be a possibility. What's your point?
"Being Tarzan used to be pretty big too, but I doubt that any child ever learned much of anything from that, except stretching is imagination and THAT is almost a dead trait now."
Well, let's see: what were the central themes that Edgar Rice Burroughs stressed?
Courage, honesty, loyalty, fidelity and monogamy in love, perseverence, self-reliance, self-improvement, personal responsibility, and above all being a wimpy little twit who doesn't need any of those things, and need not suffer the consequences of lacking them, because he has magical powers.
Oh, wait a minute...that last one is from a different author.
One of my objections to HP is the same one I have to "The Karate Kid." In KK, the wimpy little twit finds a teacher who teaches him how to short-cut past the years of hard work that are (in reality) required to obtain any such skill.
That's a bad lesson to teach a kid, because in real life there are no shortcuts. You put in the work and the time or you just don't get there, period.
In the same way, HP gets fast-tracked to unimaginable power, and that is also a bad paradigm for a child to imbibe.
One of the possible consequences of teaching such models of life to a child is that he grows up to become one of those people like the loser brother in "Parenthood" who is always looking for a short-cut to riches.
People have been comparing HP to classic fairy tales, but where that falls down is that classic fairy tales always have a lesson for life in them, something that is both true and potentially useful in this life.
In the animal kingdom, juvenile predators play games that teach them to catch prey, while juvenile ruminants play games that teach them to avoid predators.
With that as a model, HP is at best the equivalent of teaching juvenile gnus that the best way to avoid predators is to learn to disco dance, and at worst the equivalent of teaching them that "predators are your friends."