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You have to be literate in today's world. We're not going to get away with not teaching boys to read.

The question is, will we continue to fight what may be a rearguard action to defend universal literacy as a central goal of our education system, or are we bold enough to see what's actually happening to our culture?

We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

Obviously, every child should be given the best possible opportunity to acquire literacy skills.

I think every parent knows that, like, boys and girls are different. And we just don't take that into account in schools on those things like required reading lists. 'Cause that was my experience, say, with my son, who had to read 'Little House on the Prairie' when he was in third grade.

There's something missing about how we're informing the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the numbers and the letters, but we fail to communicate the importance of our connection to the living world.

If we want boys to succeed, we need to bring them back to education by making education relevant to them and bring in more service learning and vocational education.

If we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to enhance our children's mastery over the tools needed to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives.

Books written by boys are given very different treatment to those written by girls: they're even given very different covers. People also expect, in this YA-booming world, girls to be less experimental than boys: girls are achieving a lot of success, but they're confined.

We must begin to shift the emphasis of teen-age pregnancy to teen-age boys.