I brought you to this unadorned part of the web-site, away from the prying eyes of children, because I wanted you to know that I am a teacher. I love my job, and I have seen thousands of kids go through my classroom.

Some of these kids were essentially raised by television and video games. They’re not hard to spot. These are the kids that have spent more hours watching television than they have attending school. The average American 18-year-old has spent 2,000 more hours of watching TV than he has attending school. Think of all the commercials they’ve seen. My God, the commercials!

To ferret them out, look for the reluctant readers with twitching thumbs. Look for the kids whose imaginations have been stunted by a steady diet of micro-second edits, whose most exotic daydreams consist of getting to the next level of “Grand Theft Auto.”

The effects of this brainwashing will be catastrophic for our culture, and one reason I wrote THE BIG BOOK OF BOY STUFF was to fight against it in my own small, meaningless way.

To bolster these outrageously dire claims, recent statistics from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey show that young adults live at home longer, get married later, and take longer to graduate from college than any U.S. generation ever has. In short, the classic benchmarks of adulthood are being put off, or in some cases, postponed indefinitely.

Currently, 14% of young adults (18-34 years old) live with their parents or grandparents. (This is a 50% increase over the course of the last couple of decades.) The median age of marriage for men and women has risen four years (from 23 to 27 and 21 to 25). Only about one-third of undergraduates finish in four years; in other words, this is not the norm anymore at all.

Lest you think I am some sanctimonious windbag, I spent three-plus years (off and on) living at home between the ages of 18 and 28. I didn’t get married until I was 31. And I took seven years to get my undergraduate degree. To summarize, I am intimately acquainted with social retardation.

But at least in my case, it came from normal reasons: Arrested development from too much reading, sloth, immaturity, and solipsism.

“Transitional adulthood” cataclysms aside, video games are disturbing in-and-of themselves. Americans currently play an annual average of 75 more hours of video games (or competing in them on-line) than they do watching video or DVD rentals. The video game industry is growing at a remarkable 20% a year, and since I’m writing this in 2004, it’s safe to say that these numbers have catapulted in the interim.

The war between books and video games has already been fought in the minds of our youth. Books lost the war. It was a massacre. In the relatively near future, publishers will not publish young adult fiction on a story’s merits. They will publish it on the likelihood of it converting nicely into a video game.

In order to read, one must look at unglamorous text, and then proceed to de-code, analyze, and interpret. These are all high-order brain functions, and highly prized student activities in the education world.

In order to play a video game, one must look at very glamorous moving images and twitch, look, twitch, look, exclaim, and twitch. Grunting, dropping your jaw and glazing your eyes are optional. (I realize that not all games are the same, and I hate to lump a worthwhile “Sim” game in with something as asinine as “Grand Theft Auto” or “Doom”, but I’m generalizing here.) Twitching and reacting are NOT high-level brain functions.

By the way, don’t try selling me on an argument along the lines of “But to finish ‘Grand Theft Auto’, you must solve complex narrative puzzles which does require high-level thinking skills!” I know enough about video games to know that that is Caca del Toro.

Well, I feel a little better after giving that rant. To end on a different note, I’ll remind you that there are THREE kinds of adults in this world: There are the wise adults, who want to give this amazing book to a boy they know, and then there is the other kind of adult, who doesn’t know how to count.

* Some of the above statistics come from the article “Playing Mogul” by Jonathan Dee, The New York Times Magazine, December 21, 2003.