Hint: Not with gross-out books and video-game bribes.
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.
Everyone agrees that if boys don't read well, it's because they don't read enough. But why don't they read? A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the "stuffy" literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must "meet them where they are" - that is, pander to boys' untutored tastes.
For elementary- and middle-school boys, that means "books that exploit [their] love of bodily functions and gross-out humor." AP reported that one school librarian treats her pupils to "grossology" parties. "Just get 'em reading," she counsels cheerily. "Worry about what they're reading later."
There certainly is no shortage of publishers ready to meet boys where they are. Scholastic has profitably catered to the gross-out market for years with its Goosebumps and Captain Underpants series. Its latest bestsellers are the Butt Books, a series that began with The Day My Butt Went Psycho.
The more venerable houses are just as willing to aim low. Penguin, which once used the slogan, "the library of every educated person," has its own Gross Out line for boys, including such new classics as Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger.
Workman Publishing made its name telling women What to Expect When You're Expecting. How many of them expected they'd be buying Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty a few years later from the same publisher? Even a self-published author like Raymond Bean - nom de plume of the fourth-grade teacher who wrote SweetFarts - can make it big in this genre. His flatulence-themed opus hit no. 3 in children's humor on Amazon. The sequel debuts this fall.
Education was once understood as training for freedom. Not merely the transmission of information, education entailed the formation of manners and taste. Aristotle thought we should be raised "so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; this is the right education."
"Plato before him," writes C. S. Lewis, "had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful."
This kind of training goes against the grain, and who has time for that? How much easier to meet children where they are.
One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn't go very far.
The other problem is that pandering doesn't address the real reason boys won't read. My own experience with six sons is that even the squirmiest boy does not require lurid or vulgar material to sustain his interest in a book.
So why won't boys read? The AP story drops a clue when it describes the efforts of one frustrated couple with their 13-year-old unlettered son: "They've tried bribing him with new video games." Good grief.
The appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or two. Boys spend far more time "plugged in" than girls do. Could the reading gap have more to do with competition for boys' attention than with their supposed inability to focus on anything other than outhouse humor?
Dr. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, confirmed this suspicion in a randomized controlled trial of the effect of video games on academic ability. Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially. Hard to believe, isn't it, but Science has spoken.
The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple - keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.
People who think that a book - even R.L. Stine's grossest masterpiece - can compete with the powerful stimulation of an electronic screen are kidding themselves. But on the level playing field of a quiet den or bedroom, a good book like Treasure Island will hold a boy's attention quite as well as Zombie Butts from Uranus. Who knows - a boy deprived of electronic stimulation might even become desperate enough to read Jane Austen.
Most importantly, a boy raised on great literature is more likely to grow up to think, to speak, and to write like a civilized man. Whom would you prefer to have shaped the boyhood imagination of your daughter's husband - Raymond Bean or Robert Louis Stevenson?
I offer a final piece of evidence that is perhaps unanswerable: There is no literacy gap between home-schooled boys and girls. How many of these families, do you suppose, have thrown grossology parties?
Mr. Spence is president of Spence Publishing Company in Dallas.
Perhaps the problem is that we see only books as an education medium. Wouldn't it be better to, instead of trying to strip away what is new, i.e. media and video games, and instead enforcing rules of conduct severely lacking in those fields, recognizing the importance of them as educational mediums?
All truly good games have an educational model, unfortunately, it usually trains you to memorize useless facts about epic gear, module stacking penalities, and the strategic formation of mystical raiding parties.
The point being is a game for gamings sake is idiotic at best. You aren't going to get kids to stop wanting to play games, and you aren't going to bring back the good ol' days.
We should stop looking so lovingly to the past, and start looking intelligently to the future. There is no reason why the youth of the world can't have bread and circuses and education all at the same time.
If it is going to sit in front of a kid, or any person, it needs to have demonstrable educational value. I am not talking the epically phailed edutainment movement, I am talking about games that people actually want to play having information they can actually apply in real life.
The solution to this problem unfortunately needs to be handled by what exists of the educated youth, if old people try to do it, you will just fail.
Some might argue that a dumbed down world gives smart people that much more of an edge, however; there is a point at which people become so stupid that intelligence becomes a handicap, it is in the best interest of every intelligent person to ensure the education of the masses, if only for the sole purpose of being able to reason with them not to kill you when en mob.