Saturday, September 25, 2010

Best of the week entry 2

Thomas Spence, writing for the Wall Street Journal, looks at the issue of the literacy gap between boys and girls: How to Raise Boys Who Read:

When I was a young boy, America's elite schools and universities were almost entirely reserved for males. That seems incredible now, in an era when headlines suggest that boys are largely unfit for the classroom. In particular, they can't read.

According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, for example, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.

The good news is that influential people have noticed this problem. The bad news is that many of them have perfectly awful ideas for solving it.


The solution seems to be a steady stream of silly and gross books that pander to young boys and rather than encouraging them to grow and stretch their minds, actually promote them remaining immature indefinitely. The problem, rightly pointed out, is not that books need to be gross or vulgar for boys to read them. The bigger problem is that boys have competition for their attention from video games and other electronic media that require little thought.

I will affirm this as well. I read far less than I used to and some of that has to do with having a large family but a lot of that has to do with electronic media. I play more than my fair share of video games and I also read a lot on the internet. Reading blogs is different than reading a book. Blogs have to make their point in a few paragraphs, books have hundreds of pages. The best thing we can do to get our sons to read is to get them unplugged. Easier said than done.

1 comment:

Debbie said...

I had to lol at the comment in the article about Jane Austen. Ben will be reading Pride and Prejudice this year....

There's a lot to what the article says, but I think there's another reason, too. With kids expected to read at younger ages (a friend's niece was recently expected to know 50 sight words before starting kindergarten!), boys are going to get labeled as poor readers. Boys are much more likely than girls to have trouble with the physical aspects of reading (eyes tracking across the page) at young ages. So they get labeled in kindergarten or first grade as poor readers, and then nobody really expects much of them. And then they get "treated" to books written on a juvenile level, which justs adds to the problem, and so on. I think homeschoolers are much more likely to work with a child at his/her level, so the whole labeling thing isn't an issue for them.

Still, the best way to raise readers is to have lots of good reading material in the house, read good books to your kids.... and limit electronic entertainment.

Debbie (who is trying to figure out how many bookcases we need to get all our books out of boxes and accessible)