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May. 23rd, 2005
"The all-white-male canon has been gone quite a while," said Bonita LaBelle, who directs the English program at Shrewsbury High School. Unfortunately, it's in favor of making kids read The Joy Luck Club over, say, Slaughterhouse-Five. Quite the dumb move. I mean, you might get weepy fourteen-year-old girls' attention, but aren't the real targets in high school English classes the boys, who tend to lag behind girls in reading? (But yes, definitely drop The Scarlet Letter. No one actually reads that.) (Bookslut)
Argh. Now, I've never read either The Joy Luck Club or Slaughterhouse-Five, so I can't comment on the merits of those particular examples (but I think it's telling that those were the ones the critic picked out of the article). However, the general attitude of "let's make reading fun for boys" is exactly the sort of thing I'm going to be looking at for my PhD. I do (kind of) understand the worry about boys' "underachievement" (but it's more important to note that boys are performing better than in previous years, and in fact race, for example, is a far more worrisome divide than gender, not to mention class), but the only answer that seems to get pushed forward is making reading "more fun" for boys.
Why shouldn't girls get books that interest them? The point of English is, primarily, to teach critical skills (and I think that the attitudes expressed in the article don't appeciate the ways in which these can be applied to all genres of literature; we studied Mills and Boon books at uni, for goodness' sake), but the texts that are used in schools are vitally important tools of socialisation. Most texts already favour boys' interests over girls' (my mother is writing a complaints letter about KS2 SATs reading comprehension), and the idea that it is appropriate, never mind fair, to further marginalise girls' interests and sense of self, is abhorrent.
Argh. Now, I've never read either The Joy Luck Club or Slaughterhouse-Five, so I can't comment on the merits of those particular examples (but I think it's telling that those were the ones the critic picked out of the article). However, the general attitude of "let's make reading fun for boys" is exactly the sort of thing I'm going to be looking at for my PhD. I do (kind of) understand the worry about boys' "underachievement" (but it's more important to note that boys are performing better than in previous years, and in fact race, for example, is a far more worrisome divide than gender, not to mention class), but the only answer that seems to get pushed forward is making reading "more fun" for boys.
Why shouldn't girls get books that interest them? The point of English is, primarily, to teach critical skills (and I think that the attitudes expressed in the article don't appeciate the ways in which these can be applied to all genres of literature; we studied Mills and Boon books at uni, for goodness' sake), but the texts that are used in schools are vitally important tools of socialisation. Most texts already favour boys' interests over girls' (my mother is writing a complaints letter about KS2 SATs reading comprehension), and the idea that it is appropriate, never mind fair, to further marginalise girls' interests and sense of self, is abhorrent.
