CHALLENGE ME. Joanne Jacobs reports that the less-masculine readings on offer in today's inclusive common school are, well, less than interesting to boys. The column she bases her post on is by two researchers who might have axes of their own to grind; nonetheless their report suggests some disturbing things.

At the middle school level, the kind of quality literature that might appeal to boys has been replaced by Young Adult Literature, that is, easy-to-read, short novels about teenagers and problems such as drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorced parents and bullying.

We have rap and pop for that. Perhaps somebody was attempting to connect by being relevant. Didn't work. Perhaps students perceived a lame attempt to channel their after-school entertainment, which is a suboptimal teaching strategy. Kids know when they're being patronized. The old literature was not patronizing, but it's gone missing.

Older literary fare has also been replaced by something called "culturally relevant" literature -- texts that appeal to students' ethnic group identification on the assumption that sharing the leading character's ethnicity will motivate them to read.

That is about as effective as throwing a few Moeshas and Juans into an economics textbook to set up an Edgeworth Box. Apparently the editors of the textbooks see that as making the texts multicultural. But could the students get through Radford's "Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp?" (I know noothink! I say noothink! noothink!)

Kimberley at No. 2 Pencil opens up a can on those who would suggest that such inclusiveness at least makes for more female readers.

When will educators get the picture? You'd think even the gynocentric ones would notice that the overall reading rates for young adult women have also slipped, which suggests that the overbearing focus on sob story books aren't doing much for the girls, either.

I think if I had been forced in middle school to read "short novels about teenagers and problems such as drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorced parents and bullying," as opposed to the classic novels, biographies, and sci-fi that I devoured, I too would have lost my taste for reading.

Quite. Or she'd be frequently in trouble, as was I, for clandestine reading of stuff I wanted to read rather than stuff we were supposed to read. Bring on Crusoe, or Twenty-One Balloons, or Old Man and the Sea. Heck, we got some Plutarch (in translation) and had to perform Schubert and Dvorak in orchestra.