Articles/Speaches

Boys and Reading II

This is a talk I gave at the International Reading Association

Just the Facts
It is particularly exciting for me to be here, giving this talk, because as I researched it, I came realize that what I had noticed with my sons and in schools is exactly what many of you in IRA have been discussing among yourselves. I am here as an author, an editor, a father, to join your conversation about boys, reading, and informational books.
As an outsider, one thing I have noticed is how often people speak in praise of "story." Fairytales, folklore, novels - over and over again we are told that what unites all of us is story. We hear that from ministers, from folklorists, even from doctors and scientists, and, especially, from reading teachers. Teachers treat story as the conveyor belt - once kids master the code and get reading we feel safe when they have landed on story. Now, we are sure, they will be carried along until they become lifelong readers. Get them hooked on a story, I hear over and over again, and they are off.
Yet a growing body of studies and articles in places like Teacher Librarian is showing something different: story is just one way kids, especially boys, get into reading. And by waving the flag of Story endlessly we tell boys they are not readers.
To give you a better sense of what I mean, let's start with what people find so appealing about Story. Off hand, I would say that story offers two very strong, yet oddly opposite, attractions. Story is what you want if reading is about identification, if you experience the narrative along with the characters. You lose yourself in their lives then find something true about yourself through their adventures and discoveries.
The first appeal of story, then, is that it gives you a chance to enter another life, another world. The second attraction is that the author gives you a lot; she invites you in to her creation. I teach in the Vt. College MFA program for YA and children's literature, and I assure you no lesson is more frequently taught than that you need to make your story concrete and vivid, so that the reader hears, feels, smells, and touches the world you are creating. "Show don't tell" is the absolute credo, the relentlessly recited mantra, of all writing classes.
On the one hand, story encourages you to forget yourself; on the other hand, it comes out to meet you, it lays traps with words, sounds, images to draw you in, to capture your attention, to connect to your world as you know it. Story offers both seduction and transcendence - it goes after your senses, then seeks to hold you in its embrace.
But for some readers, perhaps many boy readers, there is an entirely different path into reading. This theory is spelled out in a study with the wonderful title of Reading Don't Fix No Chevys by professors Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm. Text for many of us males is much more like studying a blueprint then having a romance. We are not interested in people but in facts, ideas, and the schematic tracing how they are linked. We are not there at all, except as an observer, a learner, tickled to feel smart for understanding, and, perhaps, at the end, feeling we know ourselves, our world, a bit better because we've traced out one reason why it is as it is.
Story is a kind of magic mirror, a lost and found, in which letting go into someone else's life leads you back to yours. Facts are much more like genealogy, or a complex equation. It is gratifying to solve, it leads up to you, but as an intellectual exercise, not a personal journey.
Personally, I could read endless books in which there was not a single story, if the information and thinking in them were scintillating enough. I do not think I am alone in this. In fact, I think it is true of many, perhaps even most, boys.
Recently I've been corresponding with a very perceptive father - of a 12 year old girl. He points out that what boys want in their reading is finesse - they want to learn the angles, the tricks, the strategies that will allow them to master complex systems, whether those be motorcycles, or guns, or the levels of video games. Now a social network, not to speak of a family or a personal relationship, is a complex system that requires finesse and mastery. But there is a fundamental difference between reading to understand social relationships and reading, say, to figure out how to fly an airplane.
The boy wants to learn how to live the story himself, how to be the actor in the world, not just to lose and find himself in someone else's imaginary world. When you think about the history of reading, writing, and literature, at one time women turned to books because their access to power and money in the real world was limited. They needed fiction to explore lives they could not lead. But as the studies in Teacher Librarian and other journals have shown, we too often treat that fantasy form of reading as the only valid experience. We have substituted the imaginary life that gives you insights into your inner character - what was once the female reading experience - for books that spell out how to gain mastery in the real world.
The exciting tipping point we have reached today is that we are recognizing this blindness, and beginning to correct it. We see that can create lifelong readers with facts as well as with Story.
I see this in Sasha, my five and half year old son. He is well on his way to reading. But every page is a struggle for him. Every day when it is time to read, it is a battle, he makes faces, tries to stall, lies upside down, says he can't do it, hates reading. We fight through The Cat in the Hat, Sammy the Seal, Bob the Builder level one readers - he does OK for awhile, then stumbles on "bat," or "now" - words he knew a line ago. Even when we make sure he is getting the fun, the jokes, the story, he struggles. But one morning I tried something different. I gave him a Yu Gi Oh card to read. He sounded out and mastered "Silent Attacker" with no difficulty. To him, learning the attributes of a fighter was worth the effort. Finding out what happens to the Cat, or Sammy, or Bob was not.
For Sasha, it is not a story someone else has invented that pulls him into reading. Instead, it is getting data, so he can construct a story in his own mind.
I know that, for some of you, what I am saying sounds like a violation of your mission. You don't just want boys to decode texts when they read captions on trading cards you want them to read novels, to fall in love with Story. May I ask, why? I suspect it is because you actually have a moral mission for reading - you believe that readers who play the lost and found game with Story are deepened as people, become more well-rounded individuals. That may be true. It really might be true. But if it is then you are not talking about literacy, even cultural literacy, at all. You are speaking about humanistic, moral, education. And even then, if boys don't read the books that would be good for them, what is the point? Wishing won't make it so.
I believe, and the recent studies I've mentioned back me up on this, that in falling in love with story we have actually lost touch with real boys and real reading.
Let me put it differently: if a book is not held together by Story, what could move the narrative? One obvious idea is logic. Why should logic be any less interesting, any less important, then Story? Peggy Noonan, the famously brilliant speech writer, says "a good case well argued and well said is inherently moving. It shows respect for the brains of the listeners." The problem with praising logic is that it sounds cold, it sounds abstract and inhuman, it sounds almost like that most hated of subjects, math.
Hated, that is, by some. Sasha keeps telling me how comfortable he is with numbers, and that he will never be good with words. Cool, distant, countable, abstract numbers flow through his mind like a sweet summer breeze. Reading is barbed wire. Math is cotton candy. For many here at IRA, the exact reverse is true. Fine, but just as Sasha needs to learn to read, we need to understand that reading is not necessarily Story - it can be logic; it does not need to be characters, it can be facts; it does not need to be personal, it can be abstract.
Now it may be that my tiny lab - Sasha, his brother Raphael is barely walking - is misleading me. It could be that when Sasha is further along in his reading, when he no longer has to fight to make the word and the page make sense, he will be on that conveyor belt, pulled along by Story. Certainly he watches as many Power Rangers movies as we permit, and those are nothing but action adventures - stories. And yet, I see something else when we put him to bed. He must have a book read to him. But the books he loves, that hold his interest, that lead him to ask questions, that seem cool to him, are as likely to be One Drop, the Story of Blood, as Curious George, yet another encyclopedic compendium of dinosaurs, complete with complex scientific names, as Grandfather Twilight or Narnia. Logic, fact, information about the world are as interesting to him as an event-filled story.
Even as I write these words, I can picture one of you saying to me, "that is sad, poor boy, he is going to lose out on all the wonders of Story." Never fear, he does get plenty of fiction, and makes up even more himself. But why is Story sacred, and why isn't knowledge equally wonderful?
What would I suggest to teachers: as ever, step one is awareness. That is what is so encouraging in the recent spate of studies on boys and information books. A teacher who loves reading fiction and is eager to pass that experience on to her students may not notice that the lure of story is not always the best incentive for mastering reading. Now she, and the professors who train her, is getting that message. Step two then is to look for ways to engage boys in reading with discrete names and facts. Even names of numbers, such as google and googolplex make an interesting reading challenge. Then step three is to realize that names and facts are as alive in the mind of some readers as stories are to others. Those readers can invest themselves as fully in imagining a world built around data as others can in fairy tales.
If this sounds foreign, odd, to you, what do you think the millions of adult males who play Rotisserie League baseball are doing? They live in a world in which data, numbers, are as real as actual baseball games. NFL DRAFT Or, to put it a different way, when Jack Webb says, "just the facts, ma'am," one way of reading that is as the opening line of a story written about him. But another, if you are the detective himself, is that all you do want is the facts, so that you can arrange them into a logical sequence yourself. That's the pathway into reading I'd urge all of you to explore.

What the Vietnam Generation Owes to Teenagers in a Time of Torture. Given at the American Library Association Annual Conference, June 2004

by Marc Aronson

Download a PDF of this article to print. (96K)

I'm not a librarian, but my sense is that when we talk about teenagers, witchcraft, horror we mean it all in fun - or, at most, with a nod to wicca and other teenaged obsessions with dark power. We want to show teenagers we accept them, we understand their interests, we can provide reading they enjoy, we can provide reading that matches their world and worldview. But right now there is another much more powerful sense in which evil figures in the lives of teenagers, and I believe we also have an obligation to provide reading that can help them deal with it.

Many, probably most, of us here came of age in the Vietnam era. We pride ourselves on having met the moral challenge of our day - whether it was the fight for civil rights, or against the war, for women's rights, or, even, for greater sexual freedom, or just for the music we liked. Teenagers now have there own deep moral challenge, and we must offer reading that can help them meet it. That challenge is not obvious, simple, and political - it is not a matter of being for or against the war in Iraq. I don't care what your personal position is, and I am not urging anyone to proselytize for any one point of view. But since 9/11, since America experienced a direct terrorist attack, since we went to war in Iraq, we have entered uncertain moral territory that is directly relevant to teenagers.

We have good reason to feel more suspicious, more on-guard. As a result, we have agreed to hold people in detention in Guantanimo where they are in a legal limbo; we have agreed that it is acceptable to torture Al Queda suspects, or turn them over to countries in which torture is legal; we have agreed to deport illegal aliens whose immigration infractions we previously ignored. Notice what all three have in common - we have changed the rules, without ever agreeing that we should, or on what is fair now. How should we feel about all this - there is no clear answer - we as adults are at sea, justifiably needing more security, but having the gnawing sense that the fundamental rights that define us as Americans are being eroded. That is what I feel, and, I suspect, many of you experience that same vertigo - yearning for security, queasy about what we are numbing ourselves to, and growing to accept. Well if that is true for us, how much more so for teenagers - teenagers who in two years, one year, a matter of months have to decide if they want to join the military, go to war, be in a position where they have to execute laws none of us are sure we accept.

This is all fine and abstract, but it is also terribly concrete. How do we know about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison? We know because one soldier, Joseph M. Darby, decided he could not abide being silent. He had to tell his superior officer. The lives, the well-being, the sanity of hundreds, thousands of Iraqis rested on the conscience of one man. That man, Joseph Darby, is the teenager who comes into a library. Refining his or her moral conscience, helping him or her to make the hard choice to talk, to speak up, to face evil and do good, is the single most important task any of us, all of us, face.

Again, I want to stress that this is not simple. It is not about a blanket resistance to war. Unless you truly are a Quaker, a pacifist, it is not that clear cut. The truth is that for the rest of our lives America will be a target, and will, from time to time, be an aggressor. We simply are the only superpower in the world, so some will try to destroy us, and we will do our best to project our power. That is the fact of our time. Our challenge as adults is to give young people, especially teenagers, tools to help cope with, think about, what role they will play in this difficult period.

I suspect that many of you already have good lists of books on Iraq, or Islam, or tolerance. But what teenagers need are books that refine a sense of moral choice. We owe it to them to find books to help them face the very uncertain decisions between good and evil that await them. And defining the nature of that kind of book is not straightforward. After all, you could argue that the best book of this sort to come out of the Vietnam period had nothing to do with Vietnam, it was The Chocolate War. Arguably the best nonfiction book on moral choice is Profiles in Courage, which again is not directly about the Cold War during which it was written.

The more I think about what sorts of books might help teenagers cope with the moral choices of our time, the less certain I am. After all, I have argued, forcefully, that books do not change lives, or not in any predictable fashion. A very soft and intimate poem that a reader comes upon by accident may help her to recognize her own emotions, and that may give her more of a moral compass than any sermon on responsibility. A character in fantasy novel could well offer a young man more inspiration to make heroic choices than one in the most sensitive, interior novel. And since we have no draft, so many of the young people who will become soldiers are drawn from those who seldom read anything at all. Graphic Novels such as Pedro and Me, or Stan Mack's new memoir about Janet Bode's death, are directly about difficult topics. But sometimes it may just be that reading an exceptionally well crafted story in a comic book gives a person on a front line, in terrible situation, a sense that art, that another life, that creativity exists somewhere, and that he need not be defined by his circumstances. Studies of people like Joseph Darby show that they are much more able to speak up when they realize they are not alone with their terrible knowledge.

People who, as Herman Melville urged, "tell the truth to the face of falsehood," are those who feel they control their own destiny. A recent article in the New York Times said that people like specialist Darby are not defined by what others are doing, or what their superiors insist they do, but by a sense of themselves. It seems to me that poetry, fiction, graphic novels can help young people to have that sense, even when they are not directly about moral choice. But what about nonfiction?

When I started writing Witch-Hunt, my book on the Salem witch trials, it was all pretty easy. As we knew from The Crucible, the McCarthy period echoed the Salem trials, and by getting young people to recognize the foul power of gossip, rumor, and cliques, we could sensitize them not only to the seventeenth century but the middle twentieth. But as I wrote, I was breathing the air of the destroyed world trade center towers, my wife was bicycling down the length of Manhattan, hoping to find some place where she could volunteer to help, only to find there were too few injured to need aid, too many dead. Suddenly being in a state of fear where every stranger loomed as potential enemy was my daily life, not some weird hysteria that Puritans or McCarthyites fell into. I came to realize the power of fear, because I was living it.

That changed how I wrote my book - I wrote it not to teach kids the obvious pieties - accusing witches is bad, accusing Communists is bad - but rather, to show that when you are attacked and in a state of fear it is much harder to listen to your conscience, and much easier to blame.

Take the matter of torture. Before 9/11 no historian could explain why the courts used both physical and mental torture in Salem, when in previous witch trials people detested the idea. Since then we, the United States, has begun torturing the enemies it captures. I am not sure what I think of this. I do want to know what a terrorist knows. I do want to save lives. I do think we may be justified in using any means to get such suspects to speak. We praise Malcolm X for his "by any mean necessary," doesn't that apply to the security of our nation? And yet I hate the idea. I feel there is some fundamental moral line we cross once we do the abominable, even to those planning abominable acts. We lose our humanity in treating people with inhuman schemes inhumanely.

When I was a teenager we discussed these matters in the abstract - we knew that the Nazis performed grotesque experiments on people in the concentration camps, and debated whether it was acceptable to treat the information they gathered as science. If the results of Nazi experiments would now save lives, was that acceptable even if the answers were obtained through the most foul, inhumane means? Then, I thought not. Then I, and I assume all of you, thought the Tuskeegee Experiment in which black men where left to suffer with treatable syphilis so that science could know more about the disease, was an abomination, a blot on the conscience of our nation.

But what the hell should we do now? And what the hell should an eighteen year old do if she is guarding prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan, next year in Sudan, or North Korea, or Iran, and she hears screams coming from a locked room where the most dangerous suspects are held? What tools can we give her to help think about situations that I, at least, cannot resolve? That is a real nightmare, that is real horror. And I feel in my bones that we, as elders of the tribe, must offer insight, help, condolence to our young people who are certain to be thrust into those situations.

As we now know, the president himself consulted with lawyers to find out what was or was not legal once it became clear that some prisoners would be tortured. He had the very best legal advice in the country to help define his choices. The teenager in your library has you.

What I've decided to do is to make the question of torture in Salem the center of how I present my book to kids. I hired a teacher to write a lesson plan on moral choice based on Salem, and I'm posting it on my site, marcaronson.com so that any teacher can use it. And during Teen Read Week I'm going to visit kids to present them with this challenge: easy to see why torture was wrong in 1692, is it wrong now? If it isn't - and, I think that in some cases it is not - then how can we be so sure it was wrong then? It was wrong because witches did not exist, but that does not mean people knew that. I, for one, believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Talking to kids about torture is not a disguised way to make them anti-war, rather it is a responsible way to help them to think in a period where we are likely to face wars, terror, impossible choices, and they are going to be on the front lines. I felt that a book about Salem could no longer be about the past, it had to deal with the present, and I hope that is how librarians and teachers will use it.

Let me give you another example of the moral choices of our time - the choices your young people must face. I was recently given a diary that was kept by an Israeli girl from fifth to seventh grade. Her writing is thoughtful, observant, full of yearning for peace. She was moved by the hope of peace after the Oslo accords, and devastated when Isaac Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who signed that peace treaty, was killed by a right wing extremist. Bat-Chen was her name, and she was killed by a terrorist attack in the center of Tel-Aviv. After her death, her parents faced a particularly intense version of the moral choices that our times thrust upon us. How should they react to the loss of their daughter? They chose to respond by devoting their lives to encouraging other young people to keep diaries, and to working with Palestinian parents who have also lost children to the endless conflict. As Bat-Chen's mother explained to me, if she and the mother of a dead Palestinian can make peace, anyone can, and everyone must.

The example of Joseph Darby, of Bat-Chen's parents, shows that even now, even in a period of war, a period in which children are killed, even in a time of mindless murder, it is possible to make moral choices. It is possible to resist evil and choose good. As authors we must create, as librarians you must offer, books that will help young people to make those choices.

I can philosophize about these matters. But for young people, for teenagers, they are the moral axes of their lives. They are living their Vietnam now. If we have learned anything from our fervent youth, from our years of living and reading, we must pass it on to them, so they can face their moral challenges. So I urge all of you, when you think of teen read week, when you think of witchcraft, and horror, and evil- of course, give kids the fun they want, the escape they need, the fantasy they crave - but also offer them books that help them to face real evil. Books that lend insight into moral choices in uncertain times. Those may not be the books teenagers know they want, but they may well be the books they need.

And now, to that end, I want to call on your wisdom - can we, here today - come up with a reading list that sharpens a sense of moral choice? Can we think of books that will help the next Joseph Darby to do the right thing, the next relative of a person killed in battle or in a terror attack to fight for reconciliation, not vengeance? That would be, I think, the very best gift to give our teenagers.

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