Sara Mead has a casually brutal takedown of David Brooks' somewhat inane column on how Pride and Prejudice makes boys hate reading. Money quote:
Leave aside the dubious wisdom of taking educational advice from someone who thinks that "Hemingway, Tolstoy, Homer, and Twain," are the kind of books we should be using to turn boys on to reading (Tolstoy?!? Really, Dave? Have you read Tolstoy? Do you know any teenage boys?). A quick look at recommended and required summer reading lists for schools in Montgomery County, Md., where Brooks lives, reveals that Twain, Hemmingway and other "boy-friendly" authors like Jon Krakauer or Stephen Crane have hardly been excluded from public schools. By a similar token, recent research from the Department of Education finds that, contrary to Brooks' assertions and everyone's common knowledge, recess hasn't been eliminated from public schools--nearly 90 percent of elementary schools have recess and most do so daily.
I find Brooks' theories tend to slip and slide between nature and nurture arguments. He'll argue that boys are innately inclined to climb trees and punch each other in the face, and then argue that if you don't give them 15 minutes to do so in between second and third period, their essential maleness will be lost, and they'll grow up repressed and confused. It's bizarre. If kids want to kick each other in the head, they can do so after school. And if the differences are innate, it doesn't much matter whether schools cater to them. Brooks wants schools that are more masculine and awesome, which is fine, but that's neither here nor there so far as education policy is concerned. His article was curiously devoid of any factual arguments for the academic superiority of books with cussing, which sort of ruins the whole thing. As it stands, his piece is a brief for the aesthetics of a ruggedly masculine education.
By the way -- for a dude so obsessed with testosterone, does anyone else find it odd that his Times' photo sports a pink shirt set off by a violet tie?
