Are there books for boys, or, why do we keep doing this?

Ask Alice is an online column written by our former Secretary, Dr Alice Boer-Endacott, who has published several young adult fantasy novels and a non-fiction mini, under ‘A B Endacott’.

Last month, ABC’s Australian Story profiled former NRL player and current booktokker, Luke Bateman. The piece was arguably a primer for Bateman’s damning testimony at the parliamentary inquiry into gambling. However, it also detailed Bateman’s lifelong love of books, which he felt he had to hide during his time in the NRL, and which helped his recovery from a devastating gambling addiction.

Within this piece, something which raised the ire of many within the literary community was a claim made by Bateman that there aren’t really any books for boys. Except that wasn’t in what made it to air. The quote which stirred up so much anger led the ABC’s social media posts promoting the episode: “We need to be writing more stories that boys want to read.” However, this was absent from the version I watched on iview.

In fairness, he said essentially the same thing in another quote which was left in: “I think one of the reasons why boys struggle with reading is because we don’t write stories that will engage them.”

It’s a silly comment. One that seems curiously thoughtless for someone who is as avid a reader as Bateman and who speaks so freely about his love of romance and romantasy which are traditionally viewed as books for female readers (itself a problem, as articulated by the ever-wonderful Lili Wilkinson).

However, the rush of social media posts I saw which presented, with understandable fury, multitudes of books written by male authors for a male readership (ie on ‘boy topics’ like sport or adventure themes), missed the most important part of Bateman’s narrative: there are many boys who want to read but feel they will be ridiculed for doing so. His own confession about hiding in a toilet to read during his rugby days was heartbreaking.

Last year, I wrote about low reading and literacy rates amongst Australian men and boys. Unsurprisingly, there’s a correlation between reading for leisure and proficiency in reading and writing in education contexts. Yet rather than a considered discussion of who is struggling in this area and how we can help them, we are bombarded with a series of histrionic headlines that don’t accurately capture the issue and don’t really provide any solutions.

The ABC (which isn’t having a great run in this column with respect to non-sensationalist journalism) published an article which had in its title, “NAPLAN results ‘national tragedy’”. The title of an article in The Guardian declared “reading and writing worsens in Australian schools”, which it did, by 1 or 2 percent.

Moreover, this year’s data is flawed. Results from Tasmanian were not recorded due to industrial action, and flooding in the Northern Territory affected students’ capacity to participate fully in testing.

Given the downgrade is a couple of percentage points, this is hardly the stuff of a disastrous decline.

Similarly to last year, claiming 1 in 3 students can do not meet the minimum standards* is misleading and obscures the real issue. Reporting that statistic in this way implies equal distribution of struggling students across every classroom. That’s not the case. As the raw data starkly reveals, inequality as determined by location and background have a huge effect. What the below table for year 3 reading results doesn’t include is that socio-economic status also correlates strongly with performance.

Source: Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority.

Of course, just because the results may be misrepresented doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be trying to improve these numbers – especially where they are catastrophically bad.

The ABC article did acknowledge what was working: “in schools using explicit teaching methods, including phonics, and small-group tutoring to give kids who are struggling extra intensive help, results are going up and up.” What it didn’t say was the importance of providing resources to schools to implement these initiatives, which include training teachers and paying for the time of people doing this small group tutoring.

The other thing missing was, of course, a discussion about encouraging reading for leisure, given the strong correlation between reading for leisure and proficiency in the relevant fields.

So at last, I come to the real question of this month’s column: Why do we keep focusing our outrage on discussions which don’t actually help us foster reading in younger (male) readers? (As you can see, I also employed the tactic for which I’m lambasting media outlets. Annoying, isn’t it?)

Thus, we return to Bateman.

Several days after the Australian Story episode aired, after hearing the response, Bateman in his podcast, In the Good Books, unreservedly acknowledged he had misspoken. He spoke with children’s author Scott Stuart, who shared a number of really helpful, practical ways people can encourage boys to read. I’ve put them below in a list, drawing on additional resources, that I hope you may find useful:

• Follow the interests of the child; if they like dinosaurs, go nuts on anything dinosaur related.
• Give readers the choice and don’t impose anything on to them; if a young boy picks up a book with a fairy on the cover, that’s what they read. Make no comment.
• Model reading and, importantly, have dads model reading; if fathers are reluctant readers, follow their interests, too, but also consider how else you can model male reading (eg through audiobooks narrated by a man).
• Engage in dialogic reading: talk about the books you are reading in front of young readers with excitement.
• Lean in to ‘blockbuster’ books, including those which are adapted into film or television or in other words, drawing links to familiar media; this opens the door for ‘if you liked this, then try this’ recommendations which are an extremely useful tool.
• Normalise discussions about reading in the public sphere, such as asking sports stars in interviews what they might be reading (I personally love this one),
• Promoting a range of formats by which people can consume books (audiobook, graphic novels).
• Helping students make time to read; this brought to mind fortnightly English periods in the school library during years 7 – 10 in my high school. Often, we would just be given time to find something that fit our interests and read it…what a gift.

Some of the above require structural support and resourcing, but some of them are simple. None of them require books to be written specifically “for boys.” What they do, though, is consider how boys can be told explicitly and implicitly that reading – any book – is for everybody.

In the rush to criticise Bateman, one thing I wish had been acknowledged was how powerful his own TikTok is in simply sending the message that it’s normal for a man of any background to read any book – and be enthusiastic about what they read.

I was perplexed by the comment in this Conversation piece, “his online aesthetics, which include hypermasculine Australian tropes  such as tractors and blue singlets, suggest he appeals to an audience of women rather than men looking for role models.” The hyperlink on ‘appeals’ seems to link to a piece of work which contradicts the claim, which is confusing. However, one could equally interpret the visual framing for many of his posts as (while also being where he happens to live) juxtaposing the emotionally effusive outpouring of delight and appreciation for a book (see this video on The Time Traveler’s Wife) against an environment that is masculine-coded and typically somewhere we would not expect to see a person reading, let alone displaying an emotional honesty about what they are reading. Moreover, his dress and location are the clothes and settings of the exact people he’s saying should feel more comfortable reading. His videos allow such people to quite literally see themselves in that context, reading.

I absolutely understand the outcry that followed Bateman’s careless words. However, perhaps outcry should focus on media institutions that elect to use a thoughtless or emotionally charged comment as a ‘hook’ when there are so many more compelling and important points within such a story. Perhaps outcry could demand solutions to the problems we see in our society, rather than an exclusive focus on such problems. There are things we can do to encourage and cultivate readers of all ages, but especially boys. Most of the time, our frustration stops at a refutation of the claim, or, in the words of a colleague of mine, admiring the problem.

I’d love for us to use our outrage to petition journalists to ask sports stars what their favourite book is. Or to advocate greater financial support to school libraries and librarians which are such heroes of literacy. Or disseminate information to parents on how to cultivate reading so they don’t accidentally discourage a boy from reading by saying something like “oh do you really want a book with a fairy on the cover?”

*Articles often fail to outline what constitutes the minimum standards benchmark.

NAPLAN testing benchmarks of minimum standards outline several skills. For instance, for year 3, the benchmark of minimum standards for reading has two main areas:

First, when reading simple imaginative texts, students can: find directly stated information, connect ideas across sentences and paragraphs, interpret ideas, including some expressed in complex sentences, identify a sequence of events, infer the writer’s feelings.

Second, when reading simple information texts, students can: find directly stated information, connect an illustration with ideas in the text, locate a detail in the text, identify the meaning of a word in context, connect ideas within a sentence and across the text, identify the purpose of the text, identify conventions such as lists and those conventions used in a letter.

Interestingly, across the 4 NAPLAN categories (Needs Additional Support, Developing, Strong, Exceeding), while the Needs Additional Support criteria clearly indicate the student has not met the minimum standards benchmark, the criteria within ‘Developing’ (again, for year 3: locate directly stated information, connect ideas across sentences to make simple inferences, sequence events or ideas from a text, identify the main idea of a text, identify the purpose of a text, identify some conventions of a text, interpret a pronoun reference, connect an image with ideas in the text, interpret the meaning of a word from context, understand the purpose of basic punctuation) would suggest the student might be meeting the minimum standards.

The PISA 2022 results, show that across OECD countries, “74% of students scored at Level 2 proficiency or above” which means that at minimum, they “able to identify the main idea in a text of moderate length, find information based on explicit, though sometimes complex, criteria, and reflect on the purpose and form of texts.” This means a quarter of students could not perform at this level.

There is little literature that directly correlates the OECD categories against the NAPLAN categories. However, the NAPLAN minimum standards are more extensive than the PISA ones, meaning the claim of that 1 in 3 students don’t meet the reading standard would likely put it in line with the OECD average or in fact above it. Is that something to celebrate? No. But it’s a more complex picture than is generally presented in reporting.