What Schools Get Wrong About Boys Reading

He is twelve, and the book on his desk is about a girl whose horse dies in the first chapter. He has read sixteen pages since October. His mother, who teaches middle school in a district two counties over, told me this at a wedding in Cedar Rapids and then apologized for bringing it up. I told her not to apologize.

The thing is, I have been hearing some version of this story for fifteen years, and the official line keeps shifting around the same fixed point: the boy is the problem. He has screens. He has attention issues. He has, the most recent phrasing goes, a deficit of empathy that reading might correct if only he would sit still.

I do not believe any of this. I think the books are wrong. I think we have built a reading curriculum that quietly disqualifies most twelve-year-old boys from belonging to it, and then we blame them for noticing. This is an unfashionable position.

I want to say at the outset that I am not arguing boys should only read books about boys, or only books with explosions, or only books in which something gets fixed with a wrench. I am arguing that the assigned reading lists in American middle and high schools, taken as a body, have drifted toward a narrow band of interior, emotionally-forward, often grief-centered literary fiction, and that this drift has happened in the same window during which boys’ reading scores have fallen and their stated interest in reading has collapsed. I do not think this is a coincidence. I think it is the most obvious causal arrow available to us, and we keep stepping around it because pointing at it sounds, to a certain kind of educated adult, like a complaint from the wrong side of a culture war.

Two things can be true. The collapse in boys’ reading is real, and it predates the phone. NAEP data going back to the 1990s already showed boys trailing girls in reading by roughly ten points at age thirteen. The gap has widened.

By 2022, the share of eighth-grade boys reading at or above proficient was around twenty-eight percent. That is not an attention problem. That is a structural problem with how reading is taught, what is taught, and who gets to feel competent inside an English classroom. To put it less politely: if a factory was producing defective parts at this rate, no one would blame the steel.

Let me describe what I mean by drift. I have, over the last two years, asked seven teachers in eastern Iowa and northern Illinois to send me their seventh- and eighth-grade required reading lists. I am not naming the districts because none of these teachers asked to be part of an argument. The titles repeat.

The Outsiders, which has held its ground for sixty years and probably should. Speak. The House on Mango Street. Long Way Down.

The Crossover. Refugee. A Long Walk to Water. Inside Out and Back Again.

Brown Girl Dreaming. Out of My Mind. Several lists also include Wonder. Two include Number the Stars.

One includes The Giver, which is the only book on any list I would describe as a recognizable adventure novel in the older sense, and even there the central action is interior. These are, mostly, very good books. Long Way Down is a genuinely great book. The Crossover moves.

I am not arguing against any individual title. What I am pointing at is the shape of the whole. Almost every book on these lists is organized around a child or adolescent processing a trauma — a death, a war, a disability, an assault, an immigration, a parental absence — through inward reflection and the gradual articulation of feeling. The dominant mode is lyric.

The dominant arc is therapeutic. The dominant final beat is the protagonist arriving at language for an emotion they could not previously name. That is one kind of book. It is not the only kind of book.

And it is, by a considerable margin, not the kind of book most twelve-year-old boys I have ever met would choose if left alone in a library. What I keep coming back to is the basement of the Iowa City Public Library on a Saturday afternoon. The boys are downstairs in the graphic novel section. They are reading Dog Man, which they are slightly too old for and know it, and Bone, and the Rick Riordan books, and a long shelf of manga whose titles I cannot pronounce, and survival books — Hatchet is always out — and books about the Titanic and the Hindenburg and submarines and the deep sea.

They are reading a remarkable amount, actually. They are reading volumes. They are reading the way I read at that age, which is to say omnivorously and without dignity, swallowing entire series in a week and then forgetting them and starting another. None of this counts at school.

At school, what they read on Saturday is hobby. What they read on Monday is reading. The counterargument, which I have heard from teachers I respect, runs as follows. Boys can read whatever they like at home.

The job of the English classroom is to introduce them to literature they would not otherwise encounter, to widen their emotional range, to put them in the position of a girl mourning her grandmother in Vietnam or a Black teenager in a Harlem elevator with a gun in his waistband. The classroom is precisely the place where the unfamiliar should be required. To assign Gary Paulsen because boys already like Gary Paulsen would be to give up on the educational mission entirely. I take this seriously.

I think it is half right and half a misunderstanding of how reading habits form. The half that is right: yes, schools should push students toward books they would not pick up on their own. Yes, a curriculum that only mirrors a student’s existing preferences is not a curriculum. I am not arguing for a reading list optimized for what twelve-year-old boys already want to read on a Tuesday.

The half that is a misunderstanding: a person becomes a reader by experiencing competence and pleasure inside the act of reading, repeatedly, until reading feels like something they do rather than something done to them. You cannot skip this stage. You cannot lecture past it. A boy who has not yet had the experience of finishing a long book and wanting another long book is not going to acquire that experience by being assigned, in succession, six books whose central concern is a feeling he has been told he is bad at having.

He will conclude, correctly, that reading is for other people. He will conclude this around age eleven, and he will carry the conclusion into adulthood, and at thirty-five he will tell his wife at a dinner party that he is just not really a reader, and she will nod, and the conversation will move on. The part that catches me, when I think about this, is how thoroughly the people designing these curricula have forgotten what early reading actually requires. I do not mean phonics.

I mean the social experience of it. Boys read when their friends are reading the same thing. They read in packs. They read competitively.

They read to find out what happens. The interior reflective novel, beautiful as it can be, is not built for any of these uses. It is built for solitary, slow, attentive engagement of the kind we associate, accurately or not, with the literary woman reading in a chair by a window. There is nothing wrong with that mode.

There is something wrong with making it the only on-ramp. Consider what an older curriculum did, almost without thinking about it. Treasure Island. The Call of the Wild. To Build a Fire. The Red Badge of Courage. Lord of the Flies. All Quiet on the Western Front. The Pearl. Old Man and the Sea. These books are not, I want to be clear, superior literature to The Crossover. Several of them are worse.

But they share a structural feature: the protagonist is required to do something physical and difficult in a specific place, and the language of the book is organized around the doing. The reader learns what a halyard is. The reader learns how a sled dog is harnessed. The reader learns the difference between cover and concealment.

The reading itself becomes a form of competence-building, because to follow the sentence you must absorb the world. This is the kind of reading that hooks a boy who has not yet decided whether he is a reader. It hooks him because it treats him as someone capable of acquiring knowledge of how things work, rather than as someone who must first be coached into feeling. The feelings come, often more powerfully than in the lyric mode, but they come through the back door, attached to action.

The boy in To Build a Fire dies of a small mistake with matches. You do not forget it. You do not forget it because you spent twenty pages learning how cold works. I want to anticipate the response that this is a nostalgic argument, a Boomer argument, a let’s-go-back-to-Hemingway argument.

It is not. I am perfectly happy for Old Man and the Sea to stay off the list. What I am pointing at is a category, not a canon. The category is: books in which something is done in a place, by a person with a body, using tools or hands, and the reader learns the doing as they read.

That category includes Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain and Walter Dean Myers and S. E. Hinton and Gary Soto and a great deal of nonfiction we have decided does not count, even though boys read it constantly — books about volcanoes, about World War II aircraft, about how bridges stand up. It includes the early Rick Riordan, before he became an industry.

It includes Kwame Alexander when he is writing about basketball, which is actually most of The Crossover, which is why The Crossover works for boys and the imitators of The Crossover do not. The category does not exclude girls. It does not exclude grief. Hatchet is, among other things, a book about parental divorce.

The Call of the Wild is, among other things, a book about loss. But the grief is metabolized through doing, not through naming, and a twelve-year-old reader is permitted to engage with the doing first and the naming later or not at all. No one has to take my word for this. Watch a twelve-year-old boy read.

Watch where his eyes go on the page. Watch which sentences he rereads. They are almost always sentences in which something concrete is being explained — a knot, a route, a mechanism, a fight. He is not lingering on the sentence about the protagonist’s complicated feelings toward her aunt.

He is skipping that sentence. He is skipping it not because he is incapable of empathy but because he is twelve, and at twelve the imagination wants to move through the world, and books that refuse to move through the world feel, accurately, like a kind of imprisonment. On the subject of empathy, which is where this argument is usually parked: I do not believe the assigned books are even producing the empathy they are supposed to produce. The research on whether reading literary fiction increases empathy is, charitably, mixed.

The original studies have largely failed to replicate. What we know with more confidence is that students who do not read at all do not get the benefits of reading at all, and we are currently producing, in American schools, a generation of boys who do not read at all. Whatever empathy gains we imagined we were buying with the lyric curriculum, we are not buying them. We are buying refusal.

Two further things. First, the demographic argument. It is sometimes suggested, gently, that the older action-and-place tradition was a white-male tradition and that displacing it was a long-overdue correction. I think this confuses two different displacements.

Adding Walter Dean Myers and Sandra Cisneros and Jacqueline Woodson to the list was a correction, and a good one. Replacing the entire category of place-and-action narrative with the category of interior-lyric narrative was a separate move, and it was a move with consequences that fell unevenly on boys of every race and class. The boys in the basement of the Iowa City Public Library on Saturday afternoon are not all white. They are reading the same kinds of things.

The collapse in boys’ reading is not a white phenomenon. Black and Hispanic boys are dropping out of reading at rates that are, if anything, more alarming. A curriculum redesigned around lyric interiority is not serving them either. It is, in fact, serving almost no one except the small minority of students of any sex who were going to be readers anyway.

Second, the question of what to do. I am not a curriculum designer. I am a person who walks the river loop in the morning with a notebook. But it does not seem complicated to me.

Put Hatchet back. Put The Pearl back if you took it out. Add the contemporary equivalents , there are many; Jason Reynolds when he writes about running, Gary Schmidt’s Okay for Now, the Mike Lupica sports novels which are not literature but which create readers, the long shelf of narrative nonfiction about expeditions and disasters that ought to count as reading and currently does not. Keep Long Way Down.

Keep The Outsiders, which has survived because it does the thing I am describing, even if no one talks about it that way anymore. Stop assigning six interior-lyric novels in a row. Stop pretending that a boy who finishes a four-hundred-page book about U-boats has not been reading. And stop, more than anything else, telling boys that their reluctance to engage with the current list is a moral failure.

It is not a moral failure. It is a reasonable response to a curriculum that has, without quite admitting it, decided what kind of inner life counts as a real inner life, and which kind of person gets to have one inside a book. The reluctance is information. We should treat it the way we treat any other piece of information from the people we are trying to teach: as the beginning of the work, not the end of it.

The boy with the dead-horse book finally finished it, his mother told me, in April. He did not read another book that year. He is now thirteen. At the wedding, she asked me what he should read this summer, and I said Hatchet, and she laughed and said her husband had already given it to him.

He read it in two days. He has asked for the sequel.