Up For Discussion-It's Deja Vu All Over Again!

 A retrospective look at what Johnny is reading and why

By Alleen Pace Nilsen -- School Library Journal, 3/1/2001

I don't know whether I'm borrowing "deja vu all over again!" from Yogi Berra or Casey Stengel, but either way, the double emphasis works for expressing my fears about what's on the horizon in the area of school book selection. In the 1960s, when Americans were frightened by the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik, educators and publishers began a lopsided concentration on the education of boys because science, technology, and other military matters were considered to be in the male domain.

As a way of bribing boys to read, males were given the exciting roles in children's books and females were portrayed as wonder-struck little girls or admiring mothers standing in awe at what technologically sophisticated boys could do with microscopes and test tubes. Such primers as Dick and Jane were discarded in favor of new, easy-to-read books about such male characters as Cowboy Sam, Frontier Dan, and Sailor Jack. Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry, Maurice Sendak, and Arnold Lobel drew mostly males, but teachers and librarians were told these were perfect for group reading because the gender of the character was immaterial to girls, while boys would read only about boys.

This same attitude made publishers ask Scott O'Dell to change the protagonist in his Island of the Blue Dolphins (Houghton, 1960) from a girl to a boy. He refused, because gender issues were at the heart of his true story, but most authors did not have his clout and so agreed to make such changes. Between 1955 and 1975, the number of books featuring females continuously declined. For example, during the 1960s, the only girl's name (as compared to a half-dozen boys' names) to appear in a Caldecott title was a disguised form of Samantha, in Evaline Ness's Sam, Bangs & Moonshine (Holt, 1966).

If we fall into the old system of bribing boys to read by portraying them as superior to the females in their school materials, we will push girls back into second-class status...

In the 1970s, feminist critics and professional organizations of librarians and teachers began bringing attention to what was obviously an unfair situation, and in the 1980s and the early 1990s, much was done to help girls view themselves as worthy candidates for equal education. Today the pendulum is swinging the other way, partly as a backlash and partly as a result of the fears engendered by Columbine and other instances of boy killers.

My fears that we are starting on the same old downward trend for girls that we followed in the 1960s were aroused when I reviewed a manuscript for a well-respected publishing house that had signed a contract for a book railing against the "feminization" of schools and libraries. This trend was attributed to the "cutesy" decorations in classrooms and educators' "mistaken notion" that boys and girls should be treated the same. The author wrote, "I focus in this book on boys because their psychological, emotional, and academic futures have never been in more peril than they are today, and consequently, all of society is placed at-risk when our sons fail to find honorable expressions of masculinity." Later, he added, "I unflinchingly challenge teachers, parents, and other concerned adults to explore book selections with teen and preteen boys that capture their male imaginations, while offering them an honorable and realistic sense of male identity."

I can't argue with this author's apple-pie goal, but I was appalled at the ice cream he recommended for topping. In one chapter, he told about beginning a "Real Man" unit in a junior high school with a faked shooting of the teacher. Admittedly, this was an attention-getter, but it also exploited the kind of violence he claimed to be against.

He presented grim statistics correlating failure in school with violence, incarceration, and emotional problems. He wrote that the six-year-old boy who, in March of 1999, took a gun to his elementary school near Flint, MI, and shot a classmate to death "was a non-reader" who "could barely write his own name." There wasn't a single children's book found in the gun and drug-infested house where the boy was living. In contrast, the girl he killed was "the best reader in the class."

I worry about using such a tragic situation as the basis for curricular decisions and for deciding which books to offer boys. Lawyers say, "Good cases make bad law," because when legislators rush to make laws based on freakish but interesting cases, the resultant laws don't work well in the everyday lives of ordinary individuals. I think there's a carryover to education. If we rush to change our curriculum and our approach to children's school materials based on events like Columbine or the shooting in Flint, we may damage more students than we help. As comedian George Carlin has observed, "Americans believe that if something is worth doing, it's worth overdoing."

After reading the disturbing manuscript, I went to my local library and came away more worried than ever. I found that arguments from the 1960s are indeed being recycled. A Newsweek article (Oct. 30, 1967) claimed that one-third of the 1.5 million young men turning 21 each year failed to meet the literacy requirements of the draft. Two years later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lowered those requirements to a sixth-grade reading level because 68.2 percent of recruits could not meet a seventh-grade standard. In The New Illiterates (Arlington House, 1973), Samuel L. Blumenfeld wrote that about half of the country's unemployed youths, ages 16 to 21, were functionally illiterate, while in New York City three-fourths of the juvenile offenders were two or more years retarded in reading ability. He correlated the lack of reading skills with increases in crime rates and welfare costs and blamed school dropouts and vandalism on the fact that young people will not respect institutions unable to teach them to read. While Blumenfeld claimed the solution was using phonics to teach reading (an argument first made by Rudolf Flesch in Why Johnny Can't Read [Harper, 1955]), other critics focused on the desirability of making reading materials appealing to boys.

To bring myself back to the present, I went to a computer and fed "Books for Boys" into a search engine (Oct. 21, 2000), and came up with 15 sites, including one that reprinted the whole first chapter of Christina Hoff Sommers's The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (S & S, 2000). Other featured books included Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson's Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (Ballantine, 1999), Michael Gurian's A Fine Young Man: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Adolescent Boys into Exceptional Men (Tarcher, 1998), James Garbarino's Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them (Free Press, 1999), and William Pollack's Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (Owl, 1999). When I fed in "Books for Girls," I did not find comparable sites.

I also found that Americans are not the only ones thinking about this matter. From England, a BBC News report on Education was entitled "School 'gender gap' remains a mystery" ( news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/education/newsid_138000/138405.stm). It quoted Schools Minister Estelle Morris saying that, "underachievement by boys at school is a major challenge," but "there is no simple, single solution." Among the factors cited as playing a part in the "crisis" were:

• An "anti-achievement" culture among some boys.  
• Macho peer groups disrupting schoolwork.  
• Teaching styles that suit girls rather than boys.  
• A loss of motivation brought on by a loss of traditional male jobs. 
• The way that students are grouped in lessons.  
• The choice of books studied, including "the need for non-fiction."

While Morris cautioned against looking for simple, single solutions, I worry that in our eagerness to solve a real problem, we will fall prey to the dualistic thinking that makes us view boys and girls as opposites. In reality, they are more alike than different, and changes wrought by today's technology make the roles they will play in life even more similar. If we fall into the old system of bribing boys to read by portraying them as superior to the females in their school materials, we will push girls back into second-class status while turning women into either sex objects or targets of ridicule.

I hope I'm wrong, and that this time, as we look at gender and schooling, we won't go overboard one way or the other. I have reason for cautious optimism, because more of us have been educated to the dangers of looking for simplistic answers and of assuming that correlations are the same as causes. A whole generation has grown up with different expectations, and most of today's teachers and students can recognize blatant sexism, whether it favors girls or boys. I am encouraged that Kathleen Odean in her Great Books for Boys (Ballantine, 1998) makes a point of including "strong, positive portrayals of girls and women, while also providing male characters who have deep friendships with other males and who can withstand peer pressure."

Another good sign is that we no longer expect all students to read and love a single book. In the best schools, teaching revolves around small groups reading books of their choice and talking about them. Whatever teachers and librarians can do to help kids communicate and cooperate across gender lines will be all for the good. It won't hurt us to bring more nonfiction into classrooms, to welcome the "edgy" humor of such writers as Roald Dahl, Jack Gantos, Ron Koertge, Gordon Korman, Dav Pilkey, Daniel Pinkwater, Louis Sachar, and Jon Scieszka, and to provide opportunities for lots of different kinds of reading, including magazines, comic books, Internet browsing, and games.

While not stripping our libraries and classrooms of the kinder, gentler things that make life better for all of us, we can invite boys as well as girls to plan our layouts and help with bulletin boards and library displays. We should not forget that educational statistics show many boys flourishing in today's schools, and if we go overboard in looking for teaching techniques and materials designed for the "macho" mentality, we may create a self-fulfilling prophecy cementing the dangerous equation of maleness with antisocial behavior.

Alleen Pace Nilsen is a professor of English at Arizona State University.