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.
We only got NatGeo in the Dr’s office lobby.
By age 10 I’d read EVERY SINGLE book in my primary school’s library, and was more than bored with children’s books.
About that same age I’d red EVERY SINGLE book in the city library’s children’s section with a remotely interesting sounding title. But because I wasn’t 15 yet I wasn’t allowed into the adult’s section (not that they stocked anything “nsfw” stuff, this being a deeply religious conservative city).
So I started reading my parents’ private library. Such light reading as War and Peace at age 15, Shirer’s Rise and fall of the Third Reich at 14, things like that.
Of course not in the original as I knew only Dutch and passable German at the time, but good translations exist.
The main problem with non-fiction books for learning to read (at least proficiently at an early level) is that they tend to use non-natural language constructs and a lot of specialised terminology, plus the topics themselves take up processing time in the mind leaving less for reading comprehension learning.
Growing up I read mostly the Hardy Boys mystery adventure series. I don’t recall the books I read in Junior High other than “The Outsiders” which was rather good. High School had some okay books and plays to read. Freshman year of High School we were supposed to read Romeo and Juliet but the teacher figured a bunch of teenaged boys would rather read about blood and guts so we read Macbeth. High School also required us to read outside of assigned books from English class. The English teachers put together lists of books that we could choose from. The books included Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, sports, mysteries etc. Each book had a point value of 5, 7 or 10 points depending on complexity or length. You’d read the book then take a test or write about what you read. If you made your own arrangements to take the test, you got an extra two points. On a designated day, instead of English class all the English teachers were available to give tests on their books. Each quarter you needed ten points. The points rolled over to the next quarter. I finished my reading assignments by Sophomore year. I read mostly books like The Hobbit series, a few mysteries and such to finish it off. It was a great way to read because it taught us that reading doesn’t have to be a school chore. Reading for pleasure can be enjoyable once you find the stories or topics that you enjoy.
I think either Junior year or Senior year the teachers in the other subject areas added their own nonfiction contributions to the lists. This was very helpful so students could broaden their horizons and read books on other topics and genres. Today I buy books faster than I can read them.
As Mark Twain accurately observed, “Never let school get in the way of your education.”
My parents had hundreds of books, mostly my Dad’s and many of those from his childhood and youth. We always got books for birthdays and Christmas, starting out with little kids, then what they now call YA, but also had access to the home library. We read through Enid Blyton’s books from a relative who lived in New Zealand, Tom Swift, Rick Brant’s Science Adventures, then discovered Kipling through The Jungle Book, then Arthurian tales, and the Hastings House novelizations of the Prince Valiant comics. Then E.E. Doc Smith space opera, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, David Weber, John Ringo, and and many other sci-fi authors. Then segued into fantasy through Tolkien (which its time to reach again while listening to the movies scores…)
Around the 1990s the impending 50th anniversary of D-Day got me into US military history; the Civil War, World War 1 and 2, Stephen Ambrose’ Pegasus Bridge and Band of Brothers, Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln. One of my favorites is still “Ordnance went up front” by Roy Dunlap, along with A couple of books about Carlos Hathcock, who earned his fame as a sniper in Vietnam.
We have many of my parent’s books and countless more we bought through the years; our home library probably contains well over 1200 volumes. I look forward to going through them again once I retire. The last 20 years have been too much work and too much family stuff to keep up reading with any consistency. I miss it a lot.
I think it was John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, who was named New York State’s Teacher of the year some 35-40 years ago, who said that you really had to work hard to produce a boy who couldn’t read. To produce a whole school system of boys who couldn’t read, you must be some sort of evil wizard.
I had comic books before I could go to Kindergarten, and I knew about Huckleberry Finn before I knew about Huckleberry Hound. When I was seven years old, I discovered the Hardy Boys, which the
school teachers and librarians hated with a passion. Admittedly they had all the character development of a TV Sitcom; all that illusion of going someplace only to arrive back at exactly where you started.
I read them intensely for about three years, and then until High School I received the latest volume at Christmas. The main characteristics of the series was that Frank was dark haired and Joe was blond. It was special stuff for a boy in elementary school. I think they played to boys who wanted to be capable and helpful to a father who was absent on business the child couldn’t fathom yet, but also came home pretty regularly. Nancy Drew played to girls in the same situation. By Junior High School (Middle School to the youngsters) I discovered Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, edited by the Bowdlerizers who wanted to turn it into another Boys’ Own Adventure like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court), and all sorts of books about doing stuff in the north-eastern woods, which didn’t exactly work out for someone in the middle of the Southwest Desert.
By High School I was reading Heinlein’s Juvenile coming-of-age books.
Fiction is good, but it doesn’t have to be fiction. I am opposed to having books sorted and sifted for grade level and reading ability. What sort of magic happens during the summer break? Where do they learn to read the next level?
Boys have a different curricula of books they will find interesting. It was no accident in “On Golden Pond” that Henry Fonda told his Grandson to read the first fifty pages of “Treasure Island” and bring the book back. By the fiftieth page he was hooked.
Girls and boys have different libraries. Girl fiction is boring to Boys and vice versa. History books are written badly and boringly, with most of the strife and conflict bled out of them. This is true even into College level survey history. Consequently I always buy for myself and try to give as gifts, biographies or what I call “Micro-History”. Micro-history could be say, the history of bees in farming, or the story of Ivan Lyon, a commando who took a boat into Singapore Harbor from Eastern Australia to blow up Japanese ships. Just like when writing a book, when deciding which books to gift or assign, you have to know your audience.