`JOE Spencer was crazy about space movies. A star-fighter hung from the ceiling fan in his bedroom. A poster of a Super Nova was stuck to the back of his door … If you opened the wardrobe in his bedroom, a meteor shower of space toys would spill out at your feet.”

Author of Boy Troubles: Understanding Rising Suicide, Rising Crime and Educational Failure, Jennifer Buckingham, says many of the books in the curriculum focus on personal development and feelings, none of which are of much interest to boys.

As for our Intergalactic Hero Joe Spencer: he helps defeat the evil aliens, rescues the good aliens and saves the Earth, all before teatime.

Ripping yarns tailored for young boys are helping close the gender reading gap. John Stapleton reports

`JOE Spencer was crazy about space movies. A star-fighter hung from the ceiling fan in his bedroom. A poster of a Super Nova was stuck to the back of his door … If you opened the wardrobe in his bedroom, a meteor shower of space toys would spill out at your feet.”

Joe, as a space pilot, is far too busy to keep his room tidy, his dog is called Alien and the thought of playing space games with the Inter-Planetary Princess next door is, well, “Yuck”.

Welcome to Intergalactic Heroes and the burgeoning world of boys’ books.

It isn’t very long before Joe is being told by the evil Radnor: “This is my last warning. You have 30 seconds to decide the future of your species.”

Whether this is quite what Opposition Leader Mark Latham had in mind when he raised the issue of children’s literacy is a moot point.

But action, action and more action, say educationalists, is the way to appeal to a generation of boys turned off by reading because it is something that girls do — and usually do better.

Action is exactly what a new imprint called Quick Reads, published by Word Weavers Press, dishes up in spades.

Word Weavers Press is an enterprising small publishing house established in Brisbane in 2001 and specialising in Australian children’s fiction.

Space, science fiction, snakes, experiments and hidden treasures, they’re all there within the pages of the dozen titles so far in the Quick Reads series.

Titles in the series include The Race of Fear, Jack and the Skyhook and their first book, Intergalactic Heroes.

The directors, Marilyn Naylor, who formerly worked for a major publishing company, and Susan Richmond, a teacher and librarian, met while working at thefashionable Riverbend bookshop in Brisbane.

Teachers and parents kept coming in asking for short, exciting books for boys in upper primary school.

They soon realised there was a significant gap in the market.

“Boys say they haven’t got time to read, they’re too busy with sport, so we called the series Quick Reads,” Richmond says.

“We’ve made them no longer than 10,000 words and we have made them exciting from the very first page; if they’re not hooked by page two you have totally lost them.

“We try and make each chapter ending a cliffhanger or in some way so exciting that they have to read the next chapter. At the end of the book we like to have a twist, because the whole idea is I want the boys to say `wow, what a great book, I want to read another one of those’.”

Naylor says they were competing against a lot of other media in boys lives, including computer games, and so the books were carefully tailored to appeal to boys.

“They always like to have strong young male characters in the books, usually kind heroes because boys like kind heroes,” she says.

“They like to read about characters that achieve, but don’t achieve in an arrogant way.”

Author of Boy Troubles: Understanding Rising Suicide, Rising Crime and Educational Failure, Jennifer Buckingham, says many of the books in the curriculum focus on personal development and feelings, none of which are of much interest to boys.

“School-recommended reading lists have been cleansed of anything stereotypically masculine, which is a shame,” she says. “It’s throwing out the baby with thebathwater. There are no male action heroes they can relate to.”

The focus of school gender-equity programs has been on girls.

Although boys are falling behind in almost all areas, the educational establishment has been slow to refocus its attentions or let go of cosy grants and cosy certainties.

But Buckingham says just the fact that boys’ literacy problems are now being acknowledged is a step forward.

She says the poorer performance of boys in the Higher School Certificate and lower numbers going to university can be traced back to early literacy levels.

“A lot of the educational disparities at senior level can be traced back to early literacy,” she says.

“The gap between boys and girls literacy levels opens up at around Year 3 and within two years becomes significant.

“The gap just gets bigger all the way to the senior level. You have a much larger number of boys at lower literacy levels.”

Well-known teenage and child author James Moloney, author of that moving classic Intergalactic Heroes, says he writes to the boy in himself; and many boys like to have fun in unacceptable ways.

He sees the need to address the plummeting literacy of boys as urgent.

“The percentage of male teachers is dropping like a stone while the curriculum emphasises group work and discussion and on-going assessment, while de-emphasising individual competition, all of which disadvantages boys.

“The statistics clearly show boys are falling behind girls. More worrying, they are falling not just behind girls but behind acceptable standards.”

He says one of the problems with well-meaning teachers trying to encourage boys to read is that the the fiction, the stories, the characters, the feelings and emotions that illuminate the text, are all feminised.

And to compound the problem, the teachers then ask boys to write about how they “feel” about a particular novel.

“Men tend to read for purpose and boys make a similar decision at an early stage,” Moloney says.

“Boys are looking for characters that support traditional models of masculinity, heroism, courage, leadership, sticking by your friends, going against the trend or convention.

“Some of the fiction that is offered to them is too much on the `let’s improve you as a person’ side.

Deputy chair of the federal government’s 2002 inquiry into boys’ education, Rod Sawford, says that previously state governments and education unions had been in denial over the problem with boys.

Sawford says good teachers want boys to be successful, but in the past had to fight the orthodoxies coming from education authorities and propaganda coming from education unions and academia.

“The inquiry has had a big impact on all levels of schooling,” he says. “They simply couldn’t deny the problems with boys’ education anymore. I believe there has been a turnaround.

“The current Australian Education Union leadership have developed a far more sensible approach to how boys and girls learn which is less ideologically driven and that is a good thing.”

As for our Intergalactic Hero Joe Spencer: he helps defeat the evil aliens, rescues the good aliens and saves the Earth, all before teatime.

What boys say about reading:

“English is more suited to girls because girls express their feelings … the texts are all about feelings and they’re never action or interesting. I think English is boring and reading is lame, sitting down looking at words is pathetic.

“Watching TV and playing sport and the computer is way more interesting.” — Andrew

“I do not like reading. I am not someone who is able to sit still and read for a while. I would rather be outside with friends, or working on my bike or watching a video, or listening to music and playing on my Gameboy.

“I find these activities more amusing and more worthwhile.”

— Craig

“English is more suited to girls because it’s not the way guys think … this subject is the biggest load of utter bullshit I have ever done.

“Therefore I don’t particularly like this subject. I hope you aren’t offended by this, but most guys who like English are faggots.”

— Brad

Source: Queensland Education Dept