"Why Johnny Won't Read" - your opinions?

The main arguments seem to be these days that:

1. Boys are pulling away from reading for fun more than ever.

2. Teachers supposedly make this problem worse by refusing to allow
boys to choose "Captain Underpants" in 2nd grade or Stephen King in
high school for book reports.

3. Schools are force-feeding students "too many" books that might
interest the girls but not the boys.

4. Boys who are read to only by their mothers or other women can't be
expected to think of reading as a manly activity.

Caledonia...

Where's the support for this?

lenona321...

Offhand, the only source I remember is the relatively recent book "How
to Make Your Child a Reader for Life" (aka "Raising a Reader") by Paul
Kropp. In one chapter, he asked the mother of a reluctant boy how much
the father reads to him and she looked puzzled and says "My husband? He
doesn't have time to read - he's a man."

hschinske...

Seems to me *that's* the problem right there -- that the man didn't
read *at all*, not just that he didn't read to his son, and that such
behavior was considered normal for a man.

lenona321...

Exactly. A double negative message.

I should make it clear that Kropp went into greater detail, IIRC, in
that chapter as to why it's important for men to read to boys at least
once in a while.

I swear that wasn't the only book where I saw this theory about the
importance of fathers reading to sons, but it's the only one I can
identify right now.

An old post of mine in rec.arts.books.childrens:

These are all pretty recent books and great for anyone raising a
reluctant
reader.

Better Than Life
by Daniel Pennac
(short and sweet, this is great because of his "Reader's Bill of
Rights" which includes the right not to read at all!)

Raising a Reader: A Mother's Tale of Desperation and Delight
by Jennie Nash
(also short and sweet, this is purely empirical, but commonsensical and
reassuring.)

How to Get Your Child to Love Reading: For Ravenous and Reluctant
Readers Alike
by Esme Raji Codell
(1.5 inches thick, full of categorized lists and suggestions - and much
more!)

How to Make Your Child a Reader for Life (aka Raising a Reader)
by Paul Kropp
(Technical but very useful, with some hard-headed advice for parents
who can't imagine turning off the TV.)

Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don't
by Mary Leonhardt (a 9th-grade teacher)
(Harold Bloom might not approve of her liberal approach to kids who
don't read, but hey, parenting is not an exact science! She said she's
lost track of the number of parents who come
to her at the beginning of the year and say sadly: "I just don't know
why he doesn't like to read. We've read to him ever since he was a
baby." She said that in those cases, very often the previous teacher
was to blame.)

Lenona.

P.S. And, of course, there's Trelease's perennial "The Read-Aloud
Handbook."

Dave {Reply Address In.sig}...

I remember that pretty much every book we got at school was tedious.
Fortunately my father had a good SciFi collection so I read my way
through that. I avoided all the classics as well, which must be an
achievement of some sort.

Reading is fun, but fiction reading should be very much the choice of
the reader.

Some articles:

Excerpt: "Wait," you may be objecting, "I stock my collection with lots
of boy-appealing books." You may have Jon Scieszka's Time Warp Trio
books (Viking), Gordon Korman's Son of the Mob (Hyperion, 2002), and
Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants series (Scholastic/Blue Sky). But
respecting boys' tastes goes beyond simply possessing these books: it
comes down to what you do with them. Do you actively promote these
titles? Include them on your recommended reading lists? Present them
when you booktalk? Read them to your classes? If most boy-friendly
books never show up when you're discussing "good" books, boys will
notice the omission. And they'll recognize the implication: books that
are funny or action packed or fantasylike aren't any good. In other
words, boys are attracted to substandard materials, and, therefore,
reading is not for them.

Excerpt: Unfortunately, the textbooks and literature assigned in the
elementary grades do not reflect the dispositions of male students. Few
strong and active male role models can be found as lead characters.
Gone are the inspiring biographies of the most important American
presidents, inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs. No military valor,
no high adventure. On the other hand, stories about adventurous and
brave women abound. Publishers seem to be more interested in avoiding
"masculine" perspectives or "stereotypes" than in getting boys to like
what they are assigned to read.

(By Jon Scieszka, author of "The Stinky Cheese Man" and "Guys Write
for Guys Read.")

Excerpt: When my son Jake was in third grade, the one required summer
reading book for his whole class was Little House on the Prairie.
Jake's first impression? "Why are we reading this? Reading is for
girls." Jake is now in high school, but along the way he has worked

Anne Rogers...

Yikes, whilst I dislike classifying books or toys into boy or girl, there
are some things that just don't appeal to some kids, so like you'd never
make a boy play with a doll (or a girl for that matter), trying to make a
boy read a book that is so far over into the realm of being preferred by
girls seems doomed to failure. So far our DS seems to love reading, is
desperate to be able to do it himself (he's 3.5) but shows little
preference, he likes stories about princesses, but also more classic boy
stuff and rather surprisingly for about a year now has been quite keen to
have chapter based stories with no pictures read to him, but it looks like
I'll have to watch out, he may develop preferences and if he came home with
LHOTP and didn't want to read it, I wouldn't make him, to me, it's not
enough of a classic that it's a must read and if it was, the time for that
is when they can understand that there are some "must reads" even if they
don't enjoy it.

Jeanne...

hmmm...I read the Little House books and all the girls I knew read them
but I wouldn't have put them in the "classics" category. I read them in
the 60's and 70's (before the TV series) so maybe the books hadn't
"aged" enough to be classics. I couldn't see any boy reading them.

through required readings of E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, Alice
Walker's The Color Purple, Michael Dorris's Yellow Raft in Blue Water
and Toni Morrison's Sula. Jake's current impression? "Reading is
definitely for girls."

So my real question is, just where are the scientific studies that show
that boys are, on average, being forced, more than half the time, to
read books in school that girls would like better? All I ever hear is
anecdotal evidence. The following is also anecdotal, but still worth
thinking about, IMHO:

Excerpts:
"Other pundits--Michael Gurian, Kate O'Beirne, Christina Hoff
Sommers--blame the culture of elementary school and high school: too
many female teachers, too much sitting quietly, not enough sports and a
feminist-friendly curriculum that forces boys to read--oh no!--books by

women. Worse--books ABOUT women.

"For the record, in middle school my daughter was assigned exactly one
book by a woman: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. In
high school she read three, Mrs. Dalloway, Beloved and Uncle Tom's
Cabin, while required reading included male authors from Shakespeare
and Fitzgerald and Sophocles to (I kid you not) James Michener and
Richard Adams, author of Watership Down. Four books in seven years: Is
that what we're arguing about here?"

(Be sure to read all the way down - there's a gap in the middle.)

Thank you for your input.