“Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys”: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men--Preface

“At the most recent NCTE conference Jeff [Wilhelm] attended, he heard one such discussion. In one session, the speaker began to talk about his experiences as a teacher and single father of boys. He described the way current psychologists feel boys are marginalized in society and school. Suddenly, one of the women behind Jeff could contain herself no longer. She stood up and announced, “Boy are still privileged! They still have a better chance of success than girls! This is a bunch of—of hooey!” Another woman stood up to add her view that the presentation and the view that boys needed special consideration was “unadulterated baloney!” And they left along with others in the audience.”(p.xvi)

Strange, every school report card I read notes a deficit in the performance of males relative to females in literacy. It is also the one that seems the least addressed in CSIPs. Why would this be the case? We are all committed to making every student successful and offering every student, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or gender-identity equal opportunities for success.  Could it be that male-bashing is fashionable? Certainly not! It is not as if every father character on family sit coms is an incompetent dolt. Or that roundtable chat shows like The View alternate between running men into the ground and treating them like slabs of meat (a tactic that the same women would howl over if a group of prominent men would flip on them). This is what literate people call sarcasm folks. I honestly had no idea what a narrow-minded chauvinist Barbara Walters was until I watched a couple of episodes, and I never want to hear Whoopi Goldberg complaining about someone objectifying a woman by drooling over her physicality again after the comments she makes about the bodies of various male celebrities. But it is all fine because they are the self-appointed voice of equity.

The fact is that the current pedagogy does everything it can to medicate, denigrate, and eliminate anything definably masculine in school culture. Is it any wonder that many of our young men find little that they can identify with outside of the gym and tech center?