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“Well-meaning adults can easily destroy

a child’s love of reading.

Stop them reading what they enjoy

or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like

–- the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian ‘improving’ literature –-

you’ll wind up with a generation

convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant.”

– Neil Gaiman.

In a recent lecture, Neil Gaiman passionately warned of the danger of adults trying to dictate what children should or should not read. He believes children should decide for themselves, they should read what they love, and that the wrong kind of interference, no matter how well-intentioned, can snub out a child’s interest in reading forever.

From The Guardian:

[Gaiman] said: “I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.” Every now and again there was a fashion for saying that Enid Blyton or RL Stine was a bad author or that comics fostered illiteracy. “It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness.”

This all reminded me of an interview I conducted with Thomas Newkirk, author of the important book, Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture, Newkirk spoke to these same issues — the imposition of adult tastes on students, particularly young boys.

Newkirk told me:

“I don’t think that means that we give up on asking students to read and write realistic genres — but we need to be open to other tastes as well. Fantasy allows us to escape, to be bigger and braver than we are, to suspend the limitations of time and space. I think we all need that freedom as well.”

He continued: “I think we all like some AKA crap. No one is high brow all the time. So it seems to me OK to ask kids to value what we value; but we also have to understand the appeal of what they like. It can’t be all one or the other. We have values and goals for their reading and writing; but we won’t win the cooperation of students if our attitude toward their culture is one of dismissal. One challenge is to look at books from the boy’s point of view. I don’t think gender is an absolute barrier here. What’s needed is an open mind, a sense of curiosity. What makes this boy tick? What are the themes, passions, competencies in his life that I can build on? To teach we all need to get outside ourselves, and into someone else’s skin. I know many female teachers who are wonderful at this. And it seems to me that when a boy senses a female teacher cares about what he cares about, that boy will be open to other things the teacher asks of him.”

Yes, some of this strikes a chord in me. I’m an ex-kid myself. But I’ve already encountered glimpses of this — and open hostility — for my new SCARY TALES series. I was at a book festival in Chappaqua when a daughter and her father (after he put down the phone) had a long argument at my table. She wanted one of my SCARY TALES books. She said, “I really, really want to read this book.” He did not think it was worth her while. She countered, he hunkered down. This went on for five minutes while I sat there like a rubber dummy, agog and aghast.

This doesn’t just happen with girls.

In another situation, I was asked not to mention my new series to anyone at an elementary school where I had been invited to speak. I could come, I was told, they loved my books — just don’t talk about, you know, the books that should not exist.

I declined to meet the contraints of the dis-invitation. I concluded a long letter to the librarian with this:

Oh well. In the end we both know that many elementary school children love scary stories — many librarians I’ve talked to can’t keep them on the shelves — but in this case that’s not what you, or nameless others, want them to read. Or to even be made aware the books exist. We also know about the power of a motivated reader. And how readers grow and develop over time. How one good book leads to another. But this is what boys have always been told, that what they like isn’t worthy, what they enjoy is somehow “wrong.” We deny their maleness. And the “we” is usually well-meaning women. Rather than building bridges to literacy, some people put up obstacles. And thus: there is a national crisis in boys reading scores. And until attitudes change, that crisis will continue.

* Yolanda Miller asks, “What Are Fathers For?” She begins with a great quote from Gloria Steinem, “Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.” About midway she writes:

By manhood, I do not mean the stereotypical beer-belching, video-game-playing, sports-fanatical behavior often attributed to men—I mean something deeper. I am talking about the core essence of a male identity that has gone missing. As gender roles have morphed, women have preached and proven their self-sufficiency. The end result is that we have implied (and sometimes stated) that men are no longer wanted or needed and that their contributions, outside of sperm and salary, are no longer desirable.

* Here’s an entertaining site for to-the-point book reviews from a retired guy’s perspective: “My Dad Reads Too Many Books.”

* This “Dedicated Dads Program” invites fathers into the school:

Watch D.O.G.S. (Dads of Great Students) is the parental involvement initiative of the National Center for Fathering that organizes fathers and father figures to provide positive male role models for students and to enhance school security.

At Anderson-Livsey Elementary, which opened in the Shiloh cluster at the beginning of the school year, officials launched the program in the school to ensure students would have male role models.

“The whole goal of Watch D.O.G.S. is to attract and get positive male role models into the education system,” said Darren Boyce, the school’s parent instructional support coordinator.

* Anna Richardson reports: “Kids prefer gossip mags to books.”

A National Year of Reading study [based in Australia] has revealed that children are reading celebrity gossip magazines such as Heat and Bliss instead of books, especially if the novels stretch to more than 100 pages, reports the Daily Telegraph.

Boys and girls as young as 11 said they preferred absorbing the exploits of pop stars and models such as Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss to reading books by Jacqueline Wilson or Philip Pullman.

The study sparked debate on whether children were damaging their development by reading such magazine, or whether children should be encouraged to read what they liked, as long as it was reading.

* Over at my other blog, Jamespreller.com, I had t