In the journal Gender Issues (June 2009), Judith Kleinfeld writes, American boys are suffering serious problems. In education, these center in the areas of far lower literacy, lower school grades, lower engagement in school, higher dropout from school, higher rates of repeating a grade, higher rates of emotional disturbance and learning disabilities and placement in special education, higher rates of suspensions and expulsions, and lower rates of postsecondary enrollment and graduation... Young men are far less prepared than young women to succeed in the current knowledge-based economy, are more likely to suffer from substantial declines in real income, and are far more vulnerable to unemployment in times of economic recession.
That's quite a mess. And the problems start young. One study I looked at examined 5-year-old boys' attitudes toward reading by showing them pictures of kids engaged in all sorts of activities (including reading books). The study found that these emerging readers had already formed definite attitudes toward reading (ranging from hatred to enjoyment) that were strongly rooted in earlier experiences (mostly from day-care programs and household/family encounters with reading).
You might guess that the boys who fell more in the negative range frequently had reading shoved at them, without choice, as a part of a "daily routine" in nursery school/daycare, while the boys who had the more positive perception read at home with their families and chose their favorite books (even if they couldn't recall the titles -- they knew what the books were about).
So... Dads... you know what this means, and you know which of those groups of boys mentioned above is headed toward crisis and which is headed toward college -- all at the age of five.
As far as publishing is concerned, to address Lia's comment, I don't see the gates as being "manned" by women. It's an industry that is dominated by females, but there's no agenda there -- it's a reflection of what the schools have subliminally told boys. And an interesting study from a school of economics (was it Princeton? Help me out -- the study was in the New York Times recently) showed that it was next-to impossible for a female playwright to have their work produced; that writing for the stage was incredibly biased towards males. Talk about gatekeepers...
Again, I don't believe there's any trickle-down agenda in publishing or the theater, but I do worry that the decline of reading in the home, male role-models as readers, together with the combined effect of the innate attraction toward spatial and physical modes of learning (non-verbal) that boys exhibit may, as Kleinfeld suggests, push boys toward evolving into a social and economic underclass.
I have a feeling though... ahem... that, in publishing, 2010 is going to be a year for the boy.
3 comments:
Great post (and it's predecessor). I found your ideas shared in my head at some point in time. Year of the Boy? I agree.
I disagree. I think the problem is at least in part female gatekeepers.
Publishing and education are dominated by women.
Movies, gaming and comics are dominated by men.
We can't sell books to boys but we can sure sell them movies and games.
For many years we pretended that it didn't matter that all forms of mass-entertainment from publishing through music to movies was an all-white preserve. But it did matter. It mattered quite a bit. People see what they expect to see and a white director or white record producer had a harder time seeing that there was a black audience waiting to be tapped, a black audience that had been forced to find alternatives to mainstream entertainment.
In terms of the publisher-librarian-teacher complex that dominates kidlit we have very few males in the food chain. In terms of marketing for YA books, publishers don't even pretend to market to boys. They'll tell you up-front that they've abandoned boys.
I don't think that's because boys won't read, I think it's because we won't let them read what they want to read. Editors are all former young readers, every one of them. And they go into the business wanting to publish books they'd have read as kids. When 90% of those editors grew up as middle class or upper class girls you're going to get a particular kind of product. And I think it's silly to pretend otherwise.
In fact, does no one find it strange that we embrace every type of diversity and tout the benefits but deny that there could be any sort of benefit to gender diversity?
Thanks for the comment, Jonathon. And Michael, as always, your insights are brilliant... even if I will take issue with some of your points tomorrow morning.
Post a Comment