“If you want boys to like books, then use some boy books to teach them with, books about cowboys and indians and wars and heroes, books about building the nation’s trains and the use of riverboats, and the harvesting of fur and gold.”
Thank you for stating this - our 6th grade son says he hates to read... but he has exceptions like the Bone series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Geronimo Stilton, and some others (mostly comic book type) but he is not allowed to read them in school because they are comic books. So he only reads them at home. He also likes to read through his Sports Illustrated Kids. I thought it did not matter what they read as long as they were reading.
Some of the crap they give for reading and testing is absolutely horrible and very girl-centric with bizarre names that you spend half the time trying to figure out how to pronounce.
I was a compulsive reader all my life, for a number of years I averaged about 500 books a year, I was a lousy student because no one can average a book and a half a day without doing a lot of that reading during classes.
I was stunned in school to learn that there were books that were boring and unreadable, and that the female English teachers were fascinated with them and wanted us all to read them and be graded solely on them. I love “War and Peace” and Dostoevsky, and even Barbara Tuchman, but all those Victorian females named Jane or whatever? I never managed to get through any of them, in fact I am almost dozing off now as I think about those English teachers and their “literature”.
Some of the crap they give for reading and testing is absolutely horrible and very girl-centric with bizarre names that you spend half the time trying to figure out how to pronounce.
You might see if your library has anything by Stephen Meader, who wrote many books for boys from 1920 to 1969. His books are easy to read and fast-paced, and their main characters provide success-oriented role models. Meader stopped writing such books after 1969 when sex, drugs, and street gangs began to show up in "young adult" literature, and he refused to change with the times.
Many of Meader's books have become collector's items, but they have been all been reissued by Southern Skies. They are also available at some public libraries.
An Old Fashioned Education has links to classic for boys as well as old series fiction that is available for free in digital form online. This site also has links to books that appeal to girls.