ABSTRACT
Reading has enormous significance for the way primary school education is organized, and it is regarded as the basis of most later learning. So it is somewhat surprising that the markedly different attitude and, apparently, aptitude, of boys and girls towards reading and books in general has not become a major educational issue. For gender differences in reading provide the first occasion when schools as institutions have to face gender as a ‘problem’: how they respond to this problem may set precedents affecting both the course of children’s lives and the course of the school in its treatment of gender.
