Kleinfeld is right: It’s about literacy
In this op-ed, Judith Kleinfeld lays out the gender literacy issues:
School reading material might be cause of gender gap
By Judith Kleinfeld
Published Sunday, August 23, 2009
School is starting, and we need to remember what group is truly disadvantaged in our educational system - boys, not girls. Boys no longer do better, on average, than girls in mathematics, but close, boys lag far behind girls in the crucial skill of reading.
By the 12th grade girls leave boys in the dust in reading, according to the National Assessment of Education. The typical boy is a year and a half behind girls in reading, and the 12th grade gender gap is widening.
One reason for the reading gender gap is that school reading is far more in tune with the interests of girls. The majority of books read in classrooms are narratives, like stories, classic novels and poetry, point out Guzetti and her colleagues in their review of the literature on literacy.
“Why read stories and novels,” one high school senior boy asked me, “They aren’t even true.”
No matter how hard I tried to convince him that literature contained timeless truths, he wasn’t buying.
“Boys typically prefer to read nonfiction books, magazines or comic books that were not available to them,” Guzettie points out.
Boys like humor, adventure, mysteries, and, yes, violence. Boys also like graphic novels and reading visual material and information on the web.
A glance at what men and women read on airplanes makes the point. Men are typically looking at their computers, doing their expenses or playing games like solitaire. When men do read on planes they are often reading Louis L’Amour cowboy stories, action thrillers or books about World War II and the Civil War.
Women are typically immersed in romantic novels which emphasize thoughts, feelings and relationships.
From an early age, reading is identified as a female activity, point out Guzetti and numerous other researchers. Mothers model recreational reading and read books and stories to children or with them. Fathers read more for work or for a practical purpose.
When we hired an 18-year old handyman to fix things at our house, he was shocked that we let our boys sit around and read. His father would have said he was lazy and told him to get up and do something useful.
Not having time to read is a status symbol for many boys because it means that boys were involved in more highly valued activities like sports.
Reading is considered by many boys to be “uncool.” The consensus is that reading for fun is a “girl thing” and boys do not talk to other boys about books.
This does not mean that developmental differences don’t exist between boys and girls in verbal ability. While it’s not politically correct to bring them up, any more than it’s politically correct to talk about a biological difference for the math and science gap, study after study shows that girls develop faster verbally than boys.
Schools can do a lot to close the gender gap in reading. Most important is allowing boys - and all students - freedom to choose what to read. High interest materials need to be available in school classrooms and libraries.
For boys, this means adventure, mystery, jokebooks, parodies, graphic novels and nonfiction.
Schools also need to bring in male role models who show boys that reading is enjoyable. Some schools and libraries bring in firemen, policemen, scientists, politicians and other men to read to boys.
The Guys Read program in Fairbanks, sponsored by the Fairbanks North Star Borough Library and the school district, is an excellent example. The program brings in men to read to boys at lunch, uses books of interest to boys, and projects vivid illustrations on a screen.
“One boy wanted to skip recess so that we could keep reading,” said one male volunteer. “The books were off the shelf for checkout,” said a school librarian.
The reading gap between boys and girls is not inevitable. Just as we have tailored mathematics to appeal more to girls, we need to tailor school reading to appeal more to boys.
Judith Kleinfeld is a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She welcomes comments or criticism. E-mail: ffjsk@uaf.edu.
Tags: literacy kleinfeld
August 27th, 2009 at 6:52 am
This article reminds me of something that happened in an engineering class when I was in college. The class was all male. The school wasn’t single gender, but the ratio was something like 90/10 male. And so it wasn’t unusual that this class was all male. This class was back in the plastic slide on viewgraph projector era. The professor had nicely prepared slides that he would put up for most of the material. If he detected that a lot of the class was “zoning out”, he had a slide of a Playboy centerfold that he would throw on the viewgraph projector. That woke everyone up! As for the basic point of the article, I have a number of comments. As I mentioned in another comment, many English teachers become English teachers because they love literature. And it is simply easier for the teacher to have everyone in the class focusing on one book. If every student reads something different, that is not amenable to doing a collective class. It is usually assigned as something outside, to be followed by the dreaded book report. I certainly remember book reports with dread. I would pick a book that I ended up loving. I remember one such book was a biography of Hank Aaron. Then you would kill half of the enjoyment by having to write the book report. And then the other half of the enjoyment would be killed when the teacher would go and criticize your report. Usually with no comments on the subject of the book, just on your book report form. I remember I got to the point where I was very sloppy with my book reports because I just figured that the teacher was going to be critical no matter what I did anyway. So, even if one agreed that it would be better for the improvement of boys reading skills to be able to select what they read, a huge question would be how to implement that in a class setting. Note that the largest selling books are Harlequin type romances. Needless to say, the vast majority of those are bought by women. Finally, in that vein, I would love to see some sort of study of who has been reading Harry Potter, by gender, and what the effect of reading Harry Potter has been on reading skills, by gender.