A couple of years ago I started to notice a pattern in my son’s required high school reading: he moved from Catcher in the Rye, to A Separate Peace, to Lord of the Flies within the space of a few months. While I like all these books, it did seem like he was in the Prep School Boy Reading Series. Preppie flunks out of school and goes to New York: Preppie accidentally kills his best friend; and Preppies go to a deserted island and run amuck. It was a needed reminder that for all the work on gender equity, male authors and their male protagonists have hardly moved off center stage. It also explains the skepticism of many female educators about the attention now being given to boys’ difficulties in school, particularly in reading and writing. The canon has hardly been reformed to anything approaching equity. And just as the young women are beginning to make real progress in traditionally male subjects, these reformers can see this shift to male underachievement as an attempt to reinscribe male privilege.

There are other minefields, as well. If we want to discuss boysresistance to school reading tasks, just which boys are we talking about? Is there some uniform description or construction that fits all, even most boys? And if not, how can we generalize about gender at all? Or, perhaps, the problem is that, when speaking of adolescent males, it is so easy to generalize, particularly in the wake of the Columbine shootings. Boys are isolated, lonely, prone to violence, oppressed by a boy code, addicted to the visual media, and incapable of the sustained attention that reading requires. There’s, to be sure, an element of nostalgia at work; we, of course, were different, more attuned to schoolwork, more willing readers. At least, that’s the way we remember it.

The great strength of this book is the way it takes us beyond these stereotypes. We can listen to the young men in this study speak at length about their passions for professional wrestling, sports, computer games, comics, trade magazines and  their deep pleasure in social interaction with friends. We also can enter into the logic of their resistance to much that school, and English classes, ask of them. Smith and Wilhelm are careful to stress the individual differences among the boys. Some for example, resisted introspective literature, but not all; some disliked most school reading but loved Hamlet. While acknowledging this variability, Smith and Wilhelm carefully and scrupulously come to insights that raise powerful questions about the ways in which reading is taught in secondary schools. I can only briefly preview two of what I consider the most significant findings.

First literacy, as these young men practice it, is intensely social literacies grow out of relationships. These boys are likely to read material that can be transported into conversations with their friends. Literate activities are centered around shared interests. The mantra for the boys they interviewed was, it’s always better with friends, always. The school activities that worked for them drew on this social energy, but often the boys found schoolwork, including reading to be disconnected from their social networks.

This conclusion contrasts starkly with popular works like William Pollacks’ Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood in which the boys are described as victims of a boy code, which precludes intimate friendships among boys. According to Pollack school problems stem from a masculine code that endorses individualistic, self-reliant, action. The boys Smith and Wilhelm interview reverse this argument. They revel in the intimacy of shared interests, and find school insufficiently social, lacking in the camaraderie they experience when speaking and working with each other on projects that they choose.

The study also makes brilliant use of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, a term he uses to describe optimal and the most fully pleasurable, human activity. A key characteristic of flow is the sense of being lost in the activity: we lose sense of time, and the pleasure of involvement is more central than any instrumental advantage we might gain. Paradoxically, many of the boys experience flow of activities the literate public often dismiss as mindless. Smith and Wilhelm cleverly show how computer games often have the characteristics of ideal learning environments they present interesting and manageable challenges or problems, they have clearly defined levels of difficulty, they build off previous games, and they provide steady feedback to the player. In short, they invite the player into the flow state. By contrast, boys tend to view school reading as purely instrumental, as a means to a grade, graduation something they have to do.

Smith and Wilhelm raise unsettling questions about what counts as literature in high school classes. If, for example, The Scarlet Letter fails, year after year, to draw students into an engaged reading experience (as I think it does, even with committed readers), why should we continue to teach it? They show convincingly that these boys are regularly overmatched when they are confronted with these books. No book, after all, should hold its place in the curriculum without regard to the experiences students have with it. Schools will be more successful if they know students well enough to recognize what Smith and Wilhelm call identity markers, passions and interests that distinguish them -and to match books to that interest or taste, broadening the curriculum well beyond the classic literature, and beyond the narrative fiction.

There is often a considerable lapse of time before a major study is recognized beyond a small group of researchers if it ever does get that recognition. I hope I can speed that process just a bit. The work you now hold in your hands is profound and compelling. And it is grounded so clearly in a comprehensive theory of learning that I suspect even those skeptical of this new attention to boys will conclude that the recommendations for change will benefit all students.

It is about more than boys, about more than literacy.

Thomas Newkirk

University of New Hampshire

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