If you read news of academia, and in particular pedagogy (my father is a teacher and I’ve been a teacher in the past, so I keep abreast of what’s going on in the public school system), then you’re likely aware that a common complaint is that boys are falling behind girls in basically every measure of scholastic achievement (At least in public school).
This is certainly true, but from there follows the question: why is this the case? After all, historically most of the great geniuses and inventors have been men, so being masculine certainly doesn’t have to mean being anti-intellectual—my website is called the Barbaric Gentleman after all.
As I have repeatedly mentioned, I was something of a disciplinary case as a child and young man, and I was content to use my natural intelligence to skate by with a B- average for many years, so I feel that I have some insight into the apathy boys have towards school. And to illustrate why I feel this is the case, we can look at the subject that can most easily be remedied—English!
Within the “boys suck at school op-ed” genre, you’ll probably find several articles asking a related question; namely, why do boys not like to read? And on that note, many publishers will admit that the publishing industry right now is almost entirely targeted towards girls and women, which indicates that the disdain for reading doesn’t end at childhood. While I can’t answer why nobody is WRITING good books for boys and men currently, I can safely say that the reason boys and men don’t read is because they’re probably not aware of the many masculine and virile works of literature out there. And the reason for THAT is because they’re not taught in schools!
THAT, more than anything else, is why boys don’t like to read: because when they get to school, and they’re given books to read on their own (as opposed to somebody reading it to them) for the first time, the books they’re given are absolute crap!
When I was in middle and high school, we’d occasionally get good books to read—to be more specific, one work by Shakespeare and one work by Mark Twain—but those were completely overshadowed by tome after tome of “I hate white people, I don’t have blue eyes =(, muh grandma” books that were all exactly the same despite ostensibly being written by a multitude of “woke” authors to represent a julienne of different ethnic backgrounds—in short, books that seem to never be read by anybody BUT bored middle schoolers that “need” diversity crammed down their throats (is there a name for this genre? I don’t know, but anybody who went through public school in the last 30 years knows what I’m talking about).
Combine the terribleness of the books with the agonizing slow pace of in-class reading—because apparently some people can make it to high school without knowing how to read—and is it any wonder why anyone with half a brain will start to hate literature, in all of its dreary, pedestrian, anti-white, emasculating terribleness?
Luckily in my junior year of high school, around the same time I started lifting weights, I discovered something in my school library that reignited my love of reading and turned me into the bibliophile that I am today: pulp fiction! More specifically, an anthology of the same in all of its various genres: Rousing and optimistic “Two Fisted Tales” like The Shadow and John Carter of Mars, the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft, the Nietzchean brutality of Conan and Solomon Kane, even works of romance and poetry. All of it written in muscular and stirring style, and the overwhelming majority of it patriarchal and politically incorrect to the point where I am still surprised that such a book would be allowed in a public school building.
Needless to say, I was hooked from the get go—here was literature that was accessible for a young teen, and eminently readable (ie: not full of dense and impenetrable verbal flotsam like most “literary fiction” today), but it has also shown itself to have deeper layers in my adulthood as I have read further of the genre. This was literature in which a single page taken at random could teach you more new vocabulary than an entire semester of English class.
It was literature that dared to dream big, instead of being about the mundane lives of a family of Mexican peasants or whatever, And most importantly, after spending the better part of two decades of being bombarded with messages (most openly, but certainly not only, in literature) to hate myself, to be ashamed of myself, to feel white guilt and spend the rest of my life begging glorious POCs for forgiveness…here was literature showing white men as strong and virile heroes, or at the very least noble and well meaning failures—and yes, I do feel that, as grim and dismal as Lovecraft’s entire oeuvre is, it’s still more uplifting than the beige nothingness kids are forced to read in school.
If you want to “inspire” boys, why not do it with modern literature with the sensibility of ancient mythology? I’m pretty damn sure that Solomon Kane or John Carter have inspired boys to accomplish a hell of a lot more greatness than something like To Kill A Mockingbird has—at the very least the former will inspire boys to read quote-unquote “better” literature.
For those of us in the ‘sphere, pulp fiction can be surprisingly red pilled in the way that only literature from the 1930s is capable of being. A discussion of red-pill themes in pulp fiction will undoubtedly come in the future, but for now I leave you with this takeaway—if you want to get young boys of ANY race to read, you’re going to have to give them the literary equivalent of meat rather than a venti semen latte. Instead of giving them “ethnic” literature that is more often than not going to be written by nice liberal white ladies (and thus absolute gobshite), try giving them a nice big dose of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert Howard—I guarantee that they’ll like it, as long as you tell them about the [admitted] racism in the works in a mature and enlightened fashion—I can get over it, and remember that I myself am a “POC” according to modern progressive logic, after all! And if you’re a schoolteacher whose panties are in a bunch over the racism, you can have one of those group “conversations about racism” that you people allegedly love so much.
I can speak for myself in that my love of reading started on that day as a miserable 16 year old and finding the boon of pulp fiction, which has only led me to creating my own writing, among other great things. And I can assure you that if I had continued to force my way through “proper” literature, imbibing the ethos of “Fiction is the practice of queering reality” instead of the ethos of “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing”, this website wouldn’t exist.
If you’re in charge of young boys in any way, introduce them to pulp now.