Baby Got Books

Boys and Reading: Part 1

Thomas Spence penned an Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal last week called How to Raise Boys Who Read that has had me both nodding in agreement and then yelling at the monitor in full disagreement. Not bad. If nothing else, the article made me stop and think more about the issue.

The “issue”: according to a study by the Center on Education Policy, State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08, Part 5: Are There Differences in Achievement Between Boys and Girls?, girls consistently have higher achievement than boys on standardized tests (in grades 4, 8, and 12) that measure reading proficiency. An AP story followed that suggested that one answer to the problem is to get fart joke books in your young man’s hands – stat! This story was picked up by seemingly every newspaper in North America and several in Europe.

The Solution?

Like me, Spence has some real doubts that books about fart jokes are how to best go about encouraging boys read. As a former boy, I take some offense, too, at the idea that gross out books meet boys “where they are. ” Spence’s ideas sound reasonable, too, turn off the TV (and other electronic devices) and fill the house with books. A recent peer-reviewed study has found a strong correlation between home library size and children’s overall success in school. Spence has a more elitist attitude about the whole thing though, suggesting that the fart school of thought:

…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…Whom would you prefer to have shaped the boyhood imagination of your daughter’s husband—Raymond Bean or Robert Louis Stevenson?

Well, if he’s going to fit in around here, he had better have read both. We like well rounded types that can effortlessly bridge the gap between lowbrow and highbrow. Does it have to be one extreme or the other? I really don’t think that anyone is suggesting a steady diet of nothing but fart books.

Urbane sophisticates eschew fart books.

I am also dubious of arguments that place blame at the feet of video games for all of society’s ills. It’s too easy and often wrong. Spence argues that the reading disparity “goes back to 1992″ and “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.” However, the CEP study, in my reading, doesn’t support this argument. The gap in achievement is described in the CEP report as “historical” and the “female subgroup has consistently scored higher than the male subgroup at all grades tested (4, 8, and 12) since 1992, when the current trend lines began.” Did the data gap trend begin in 1992 or is 1992 the year for which data are first available? I’m thinking the latter, but I could be wrong. Either way, video games were around and prevalent well before 1992.

The biggest issue I had with Spence’s article though comes at the very end:

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?

It would perhaps be more answerable if Spence provided a source for this piece of evidence. This finding is not included in the CEP report, so it’s not possible to say “well, what about the half-dozen potential confounding variables that the authors forgot to consider?”, for example. I guess it really is unanswerable. The judgement and sense of moral superiority packed into that paragraph are truly something to behold.

Take the time to read the actual CEP study, it’s worth the time if you are interested in the topic. Tune in next week for a closer look at what the study actually says…and doesn’t say.

Books | Tim | September 29, 2010 8:07 am

10 Comments

By Len, September 29, 2010 @ 10:18 am

A couple of thoughts.

First, this notion that you can only get boys to read by pushing scatology and gross-out humor goes back to the rise of the Goosebumps books back in the ’90s. I was a bookseller back then, and pretty much every copy of that dreadful series that I ever sold was to a parent who hoped it would be the talisman to start their son down the trail to literacy. If the study is to be believed, and there seems to be no reason not to, that approach didn’t work then and there is no reason to think it will work now.

I had my son read “Of Mice and Men” instead. He’s now knee-deep in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe.” It’s surprising how entertaining quality writing can be.

Second, Spence’s assertion that “the reading disparity ‘goes back to 1992′ and ‘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’” is a classic example of my favorite logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is the assumption that because two things happened in succession in that that one must have caused the other.

Third, typically, when a conservative puts forth a fact that he deems “unanswerable,” it is because he has only just finished making it up. We call this Rush Limbaugh Syndrome.
By Tom Spence, September 29, 2010 @ 11:10 am

Thanks for writing about my piece in the WSJ. I’d like to clarify three points. First, I did not mean to suggest that boys should read ONLY “high” literature. I don’t think their interest in the vulgar, base, and lurid should be encouraged, but my wife and I have managed to find plenty of light material on themes other than farting and boogers.

Then there’s the video games issue. My concern in raising a house full of male readers has been with electronic entertainment in general (including TV), not just video games. The point I wished to make is that electronic entertainment is fearsome competition for other activities–reading, sports, playing with siblings and friends, and so on. I’m content to rely on the overwhelming anecdotal evidence from the many friends and teachers I’ve talked to over the years. I’m NOT saying that electronic entertainment is always and necessarily harmful. Parents need to monitor carefully how much time their children devote to it, and that can be hard to do. Many parents, in my opinion, are too timid about limiting the hours of electronic entertainment, and I hoped to encourage them with my article.

As for the studies, the 1992 figure came from the NAEP report, not from the CEP report. Other readers have pointed out that I seem to have misread the data on the NAEP website. The boy-girl reading gap goes back at least to 1971, so it obviously can’t be blamed on video games. Mea culpa.

As for my “post hoc” error: I tried to make it clear that I was noting only a correlation. We make many judgments in life based on correlation because causation is often impossible to prove. If Len’s judgment on this is different from mine, fine. (I also cited a scientific study on the effect of video games on academic performance. You can look it up and evaluate it for yourself.)

Finally, the offending comment about homeschooling at the end of my piece. I stumbled upon that assertion in an article about the work of Judith Kleinfeld, a psychologist at the Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks. (I confess that I didn’t check to see if she suffers from Rush Limbaugh Syndrome.) Here’s my point: I think it’s safe to assume that very few homeschooling parents give their sons “gross-out” books to read. Since those boys do not lag behind their sisters in reading, there must be other ways to get boys to read than by appealing to their basest interests. My own children are not homeschooled, and I did not intend to imply anything about the merits of homeschooling vs. traditional schooling or about the virtue of homeschoolers. I don’t see, therefore, how my last paragraph expresses “judgment” or a “sense of moral superiority.”
By jen, September 30, 2010 @ 1:02 pm

Also, girls like fart jokes too.
By Len, September 30, 2010 @ 1:14 pm

Tom (if I may be so bold)–A fine response. Let me clarify my point a bit further. Regardless of whether people rely on post hoc reasoning to make judgements or not, it is still a logical fallacy and should not be relied on. Believe me, I have ones that I fight with myself over using all the time and have to come to the depressing conclusion that I cannot use those seeming correlations as arguments. Post hoc arguments are one of the bedrock weapons used by conspiracy theorists and should be avoided.

As far as quoting a fact that was stumbled upon third hand, I think it may be overreaching to call it “unanswerable.” However, my last paragraph was an opinion stated as fact, and a pretty loose opinion at that. I apologize if what was really an offhand satiric sally (the worth of which can be debated) offended. I overstepped. However, in my defense, I had no idea that you would ever read my comment, and most of us tend to be cattier when the other person is not in the room.
By Len, September 30, 2010 @ 1:26 pm

Just for the record, my conservatives=Rush Limbaugh joke was itself a logical fallacy, The Converse Fallacy of Accident.
By Jim Randolph, October 10, 2010 @ 3:04 pm

Looking forward to Aart II. As a teacher and now elementary school librarian, I must say that while I no big fan of the Goosebumps books themselves, in most cases your parent customers were right, Len. Most kids who read those reached a point where even they had had enough of them and asked for something different. At that exciting point–let’s call it The Goosebumps Threshold, though it is true for other series books as well–I would recommend something “better” like John Bellairs or Mary Downing Hahn and off they would go, reading more and better books. The same argument was used for Babysitter’s Club, Hardy/Boys Nancy Drew, and comics series in general–even as far back as westerns, detective and other “dime store” serials that have always thought to have been fluff.
By Mrs. N, October 10, 2010 @ 8:22 pm

Thanks for the thought provoking post. I’m a third grade teacher and I constantly am facing the question of what to do to get boys to read. I’m lucky in that I teach in an area where children have a great deal of access to books and parents who both support and push their children to read. I consider myself lucky because over the years I’ve been able to establish a “not in my classroom” philosophy towards the fart books, the Goosebumps books, the Captain Underpants and Diary of a Wimpy kid series. I absolutely agree that sometimes they are the only thing that will get a child reading and if I ever am in the situation of offering gross out or nothing, you better believe I’ll cave, but for right now, my students will read that kind of stuff on their own, and I’m able to use my position to push other stuff. Like Jim says, if a student reads enough of those books, they’ll often be ready for something else. It doesn’t work for everyone, but in my sample of one, I’ve been able to sell boys on the Little House series and more recently, Grace Lin’s books. The key? Peer pressure. Since my world is a classroom situation all I really need is one ally, one boy who will read what I suggest. Once that door is open, if he likes it, he’ll suggest it to others. Anyway, thanks for making me think, I’ll definitely be back for Part 2.