The Truth About Boys and Reading

September 2007 Special Sections

It would not be a stretch to say that wrestling made librarian Patrick Jones what he is today—not the helmet-and-singlet-clad wrestlers featured in the Olympics, but professional wrestlers of the folding-metal-chair-to-the-head variety. As you might have guessed, Jones isn’t your average librarian. The outreach manager for the Hennepin County Library is also an author, library consultant, and recipient of the Scholastic Library Publishing Award for lifetime achievement. It was an award Jones earned in no small part for his ability to get teenagers into libraries and into reading.

Jones, now forty-six years old, grew up in Flint, Michigan, an avid non-reader until middle school when he stumbled on wrestling magazines. Back then, World Wrestling Entertainment didn’t exist but a regional circuit of professional wrestlers with names like The Sheik and Johnny Valentine did. By 1985, Jones was working as a librarian in Savannah, Georgia; a year later he became a young adult librarian in Springfield, Massachusetts. In those early years, he made a discovery: “I noticed dudes weren’t nearly as interested in reading as girls were.” It was now the era of Hulk Hogan, so Jones tried an experiment. “I started thinking about how to get boys involved and started bringing in wrestling magazines,” he says. “And it worked.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s still not easy to get boys to read. As a whole, they still read less well and less often than girls. For more than thirty years, boys in the United States—and around the world—have consistently lagged behind girls on literacy test scores beginning in the fourth grade and lasting into high school. It’s an alarming, long-term trend that some worry could lead to a generation of barely literate men with fewer career choices and lower earning power.

But Jones’ discovery—that boys will read when the subject interests them—is an important one. As we’ve  learned more about the different ways in which boys and girls learn, it’s an idea that’s gained traction. Schools and libraries still favor a “one size fits all” approach that plays to the reading strengths and interests of girls, but Jones and others insist there are more ways than ever for boys to get involved in reading—we just need to let them.

What Science Tells Us
Girls are simply hardwired to be better readers, says author and researcher Michael Gurian, who studies the biological and neurological differences between the genders at his Colorado-based Gurian Institute. Brain scans and other tests reveal that girls have more access to areas of the brain that support reading and associated skills, including detailed memory and listening.

In his book The Minds of Boys, Gurian notes that the “female brain utilizes more neural pathways and brain centers for word production and expression of experience, emotion, and cognition through words.” Consequently, girls know more words sooner, remember their meanings longer—and use them more, too.