The infant brain's development and its neurological pathways are greatly influenced by the nurturing and socialization the child receives.

We all know that girls and boys are nurtured in subtlely different ways even by parents who are trying to be evenhanded about it. This is partially in response to the cues that parents receive from the infant.

Suppose that the nurturing given to girls sets up their brain pathways to be more receptive to reading the way it's taught later in life, at the ripe old age of 6, in the US -- probably too early by about two years for a substantial minority of children anyway.

Suppose that the nurturing given to boys wires their brains in a way that makes learning to read as it's currently taught more difficult. If you fail at something often enough, if you do it "wrong" or not well enough, you see yourself failing, and the adults around you see you as a failure (the paradigm of Education Past) or as having a disability (the paradigm of Education Present), then you will continue to struggle with it for years. You may even give up and write it off as a skill you can do without.

It's like being left-handed in writing class: nothing wrong with being a leftie, but everything is set up for the right-handers.

Jon Scieszka (pronounced SHEE-skuh) has developed a literacy project aimed at boys called Guys Read. Mr. Scieszka is the author of The Time Warp Trio comedy SF series for 9- to 12-year-olds, as well as The Stinky Cheese Man (a burlesque of a number of well-known fairy tales), Math Curse (a picture book featuring a math teacher named Ms. Fibonacci who counts, "1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13..."), and an assortment of other books for children. Below is a list of known reasons why some boys won't, then don't, and ultimately can't read, taken from the Guys Read website.

• Biologically, boys are slower to develop than girls and often struggle with reading and writing skills early on.

• The action-oriented, competitive learning style of many boys works against them learning to read and write.

• As a society, we teach boys to suppress feelings. Boys aren’t practiced and often don’t feel comfortable exploring the emotions and feelings found in fiction.

• Boys don’t have enough male role models for literacy. Because the majority of adults involved in kids’ reading are women, boys don’t see reading as a masculine activity.

• Many books boys are asked to read don’t appeal to them. They aren’t motivated to want to read.

One way to help boys is to make sure the materials used to teach reading are appealing to boys, that is, to use a lot more beginner-level non-fiction and humor than is currently used. Anyone who can't directly affect this issue can provide materials for fun reading that will make boys want to know what's in there, even if it's a struggle. One excellent, if a little dated, source for suggestions is Great Books for Boys: More Than 600 Books for Boys 2 to 14 by Kathleen Odean.

Another way is for men to model reading behaviors for boys. Any of youse guys volunteer to be a guest reader in an elementary school lately???

If we could raise the grade level at which reading is expected to be learned to Grade 2, many boys who are developing normally for their gender, but are still not quite there as far as eye-muscle and hand-muscle development are concerned, would experience success from the beginning, and would not be playing the catch-up game that misidentifies them as disabled. This would free up reading specialists to help children with more profound problems.

Only some suggestions.

This kind of culturally-caused "disability" drives me absolutely nuts. There's nothing wrong with a lot of of these boys that a little awareness by adults can't fix.