Over at Snark & Shotguns comes a timely bit of analysis:
In 2015 a team of researchers walked into German classrooms and asked teachers to rate how good boys and girls are at reading. The average answer was that girls are better. Then they tracked the kids for two years. Boys whose teachers held the strongest stereotype saw their reading self-concept drop measurably, holding actual achievement constant. The teachers weren’t making the boys worse readers. They were making the boys believe they were worse readers, which boys, being human, respond to by reading less.
It gets funnier. A French team in 2016 gave eighty third-graders the same reading task twice. First time it was framed as a reading test. Boys flopped. Second time, same task, framed as a game. Boys beat the girls. And here’s the punchline — the boys most damaged by the “test” framing were the boys who cared most about reading. The ones who’d internalized that reading mattered were the ones whose performance collapsed the moment reading was put in the institutional cage labelled Test.
And then the most telling observation:
Last thought, and this one really matters. Jerrim and Moss, in the biggest international study of its kind, looked at 297,000 fifteen-year-olds across 35 countries and asked which kind of reading develops reading skill.
Answer: fiction.
Only fiction.
Non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, comics… Once you control for fiction, none of those do the work. The gender gap in fiction specifically is larger than the gender gap in any other text type.
Boys are not failing to read. Boys are failing to read the one thing that makes them better readers.
I can attest to this. When we started homeschooling the Son&Heir, fresh out of Catholic middle school, we tested his reading skills and found them to be around sixth-grade level.
So in addition to whatever else we taught him (Saxon Math, mostly), he had to read for no less than four hours a day. Every day. And by “every”, I mean Monday through Sunday. (We made allowances for family outings and so on, but that as the guideline.)
At first, he kicked and screamed, complaining that he kept falling asleep, to which our response was, “Fine. If you fall asleep, don’t worry about it. Just keep reading when you wake up.” We didn’t really much care what he read, only that it couldn’t be a picture book or comics. And because he didn’t know what to read, I gave him a series of books from our library to start with. There were no restrictions about following the list, however; if he got halfway through a book and it failed to keep his interest, he could quit reading it — but he had to explain to me why he’d done so.
It took about a year. And then one day he asked me: “Do we have any more books by Daphne du Maurier?” He’d found a favorite author. In the following months, he read her entire body of work. And then came the real breakthrough: he discovered fantasy, in the shape of R.A. Salvatore (author of about a jillion titles), and over the next few years read all of his body of work.
All of a sudden, we couldn’t stop him reading. He moved on to the Great Books — he still has the set — and never looked back. To this day, he is one of the most well-read men I know. His B.A., by the way, carries a Philosophy major, which is not a discipline for the non-reader. (He reads stuff, e.g. Hegel, that makes his father’s brain hurt.)
I know: the plural of anecdote is not data. But it certainly supports the Jerrim and Moss experiment.
Now go and read the whole article to see how badly public schools have served our boys.
We educated our son at home. Reading was paramount and he took right to it, reading 100 books a year.
As my ol’ gray haired Pappy once said, “Teach a kid to read, then get out of his way.”
As I once said, “If you lose everything, you still have your ability to read, so all is not lost.”
Long rant here. Summary: Public Education is vile, especially for boys, especially in todays world.
I’m not much of a writer, so forgive the stream of consciousness, ramblings.
I grew up a while ago, 70’s & 80’s in a very rural Farming/Ranching community. My family was very big on self-education so we had a lot of books around. Still do. Mom was a very devout lady, and the church pianist. So if the church doors were open, we were there, on the front pew. Dad was not of a religious persuasion, so it was Mom & us.
This being a Baptist Church you were expected to sit still and listen to the message, we left the snake-handling to the Pentecostals.
I state all of the above because when I started Kindergarten, and they started going through the curriculum, I realize I was about 90% already able to read. In church all we had were Bibles (KJV) & Hymnals, and the only entertainment for a four year old, was following along with the sermon, and through mimicry, and reasoning, I was able to put the words together from the Bible & Hymnals and taught myself to read.
And I fell in love with it. So I started ready “youth” books we had at home, about Cowboys, Pirates, hero’s & villains. Mostly fiction, and I loved it. Enjoyed the stuff we read in school too.
Then in the late 70’s we got “New” school text books. Instead of the old Pirate stories, now we had to read about some Puerto Rican kid in NYFC was ashamed because he was on welfare, or how Jenny didnt get along with her mother. I didn’t hate reading, but I hated reading that unrelatable shit, and my attitude and marks showed it. Then I’d come home and tear into a Readers Digest or whatever.
This would turn into a million word rant. But reading fiction, especially for boys is really important, and “Adventure” fiction even more so. I didn’t realize this until I was middle-aged, but school is mostly prison for us males. We are artificially confined, artificially expected to defer to our “betters”, and deal with the Social life bullshit of those around us. Reading fiction, allowed me to mentally escape this. A novel or short story, put ME at least for a brief period of time, on the High-Seas, or horseback, or football field, rather than the dreary four walls around me, and for a while I was free.
When Public Education started injecting “Empathy” into their stories, I could see early on, it wasn’t because they needed me to read better, it was because they wanted to change what I thought, and I bitterly resisted it the only way I could at the time.
The “Me” that wanted to climb mountains, or slay dragons, might also say nigger in passing, or rough-house in the hallways, or God Forbid vote a different way than the Teachers Union or some .gov functionary would want.
Thank God I had a Dad who understood this when he saw it, and helped me & my brother, navigate through it. I remember coming home once very frustrated about the above, and not being able to articulate it at the time, falling back on “Its what the teacher said.” to which his response was “What makes you think they know anything” Thanks Pop, valuable lesson there.
Also thanks to Authors like H. Rider Haggard, Harold Lamb, & PG Wodehouse. I love the worlds you have created, and love visiting them, & wish I existed there.
Growing up on a farm in the 60’s and 70’s (with NO TV), it’s not like I had a lot of choice in my entertainment opportunities. Thankfully, I learned to read reasonably early (about age 4) and started 1st grade on my 5th birthday. I went to a tiny Catholic two-room school in northwestern Missouri, where all the books were written (and likely printed), before WWII. We later moved to a town with a Carnegie Library (right across the street from my school) and I lived in that library for 7 years. In 7th grade, I tried to check out Valley of the Dolls and got DENIED. I’m a problem solver, so I got my Mom to check it out for me, so I could see what all the fuss was about. One summer, my grandfather offered me a $1 Morgan for every book I read and wrote a report on, so by the end of summer he owned by $81. He paid.
Honorable mention goes to National Geographic, which was a parochial school kid’s Playboy back in The Long Ago.