Here are the cold facts:
America’s boys are the most violent in the industrialized world.
50% of all minority male students drop out of school.
87% of boys play explicitly violent video games.
92% of convicted violent felons are male.
Seattle-based BoysRead.org is an organization of parents, educators, librarians, mentors, author that believes that “male literacy is part of the solution.”
In 2004 the NEA study, “Reading at Risk: a Survey of Literary Reading in America,” found that reading by young men plummeted from 55 percent to 43 percent; by working to develop a lifelong passion for reading in boys, which includes teaching them about the realities of war, BoysRead.org hopes to reverse this potential catastrophic cultural trend.
Their website offers numerous helpful hints and resources to get and keep the boys reading.
We can’t afford not to support them.