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.
