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Why children have stopped reading
It’s only when you read the old stories again, to a child maybe, that you become aware of the extent to which the characters still live inside your mind, bobbing about just below the level of consciousness. I still find myself puzzling over the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, decades after I first read them. How could Little Red Riding Hood have avoided being eaten? (We read the original, merciless version.) What should Hansel and Gretel have done?
Any good book leaves its mark, but the characters from the books you loved as a child embed themselves. They inform the way you think as an adult, which is why it’s so sad and so significant that children all over the West have stopped reading.
On the next three pages of this week’s Spectator, our writers reveal which characters from their childhood books still haunt them. Rod Liddle’s head is full of imaginary rabbits; Rory Sutherland admires Dr Seuss’s anarchic Cat in the Hat. Lionel Shriver identifies with Pippi Longstocking: ‘I always identified with characters in storybooks who don’t do as they’re told.’ This is true of most of our writers – Richmal Compton’s William Brown pops up so regularly in our poll that I now think of him as the guiding spirit of The Spectator, and I’m proud that he is.
Meanwhile, this summer’s ‘What Kids Are Reading’ report, a study of more than 1.2 million pupils across Britain, shows a 4.4 per cent decrease in the number of books children are reading compared with last year. A survey of UK teachers reveals that they would describe a third of their pupils as ‘weak readers’ who struggle to keep up with the curriculum. (And the curriculum really isn’t hard to keep up with.) The most recent Annual Literacy Survey from the National Literacy Trust (NLT), published in September lastyear, found an alarming 26 per cent decrease since 2005 in the number of children reading daily for fun. Less than half of our children now say they enjoy reading. A professor Keith Topping, from Dundee University, who analysed the NLT data, was quoted as saying: ‘The key takeaway is that more reading practice at an appropriate level of difficulty improves pupils’ performance.’ I’m not sure what that means, except that if people in the literacy business are using phrases like ‘key takeaway’, we have a problem.
As the art of reading fades, so, ironically, the scientific evidence demonstrating how valuable and beneficial it is to a young mind only grows. It’s not just about vocab or acquiring information; there’s now a provable link between reading and empathy. Brain scans of children absorbed in fiction show extra connections wriggling through their cerebellums as they inhabit each character. If a child is properly engrossed, then when she reads about, say, a swimmer, the same bits of her brain will start firing as if she was herself swimming. ‘Fiction is a kind of simulation, one that runs not on computers but on minds,’ says Keith Oatley, a professor who studies the psychology of fiction.
I recently read to my son a favourite book from my own childhood: Where the Red Fern Grows by the American Wilson Rawls. And as I did, I rediscovered the mental pictures I’d made as an eight-year-old, left snagged along the storyline. What was interesting to me was that the images I’d conjured were from the perspective of the hero, as if I was that boy with his dogs in the Oklahoma Ozarks. The film of the book, which we later watched, was a distant drone’s-eye view.
The NLT is excited by these brain-scan results. In its latest pro-reading campaign it urges people to read so as to boost their empathetic scores. Empathy as self-enhancement! That’s a sign of the times all right.
The NLT might also take a line from the late American philosopher Allan Bloom, who insisted that great fiction gives us an understanding not only of other people, but of ourselves. I still remember the awful realisation that I, like bad Edmund from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, might have chosen to betray my siblings for some of the White Witch’s tasty Turkish Delight. In fact I still sometimes think about how very delicious it must have been. It’s a useful thing to know about yourself and oddly reassuring to find in print. That’s real representation.
The most obvious and undeniable cause of the great reading drought is screens. How could it not be? I’ve lost count of the number of adults who’ve confessed to me that the presence of their smartphones has put paid to reading fiction completely. It’s impossible to submerge yourself in another world when the iPhone next to you tugs at you like Gollum’s ring. And if adults can’t resist, how can we expect children to?
‘Why can’t you read a book?’ I say irritably to my son while prodding away at my phone. ‘Mum,’ he says, ‘honestly!’ So I impulse-buy some fiction on Amazon to keep alive the image of myself as a reader and pile up the unread books in the hall.
Generations Z and Alpha, who’ve seen the steepest decline in reading for pleasure, report that they’re too anxious to read, which sounds daft but makes sense. The rhythms of social media are dementing. All the endless video clips are cut short before they resolve, cliffhanger style, to ensure that the kids keep scrolling. You can’t immerse yourself in another world when you’re in a permanent state of fight or flight.
Even so, I’m hopeful that, for the middle classes at least, the smartphone message is getting through. Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have convincingly warned us about the dangers of social media and I predict that quite soon it will be the north London virtue-signal of choice to send your teen to school with a Nokia.
But the reading decline is not just about the screens. There’s a more pernicious and troubling cause. Last spring an American author and editor called Katherine Marsh wrote a piece in the Atlantic magazine entitled, ‘Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love with Reading’. Marsh’s theory was that it’s the way schools are teaching literature across the West that is actually putting children off: the endless focus on analysis and the lack of enthusiasm for story.
Marsh gives the example of the way Amelia Bedelia – a popular American series for the under-tens by Peggy Parish – is taught. Amelia Bedelia is funny. She’s a hapless housekeeper who takes instructions too literally. When she’s told to draw the curtains, for instance, she gets out a pencil. But pupils don’t get a chance to enjoy Amelia’s antics. They’re told in class not to worry about the actual story or even to read the book to the end, but just to look at a single paragraph and identify the nonliteral and figurative language it contains.
‘For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging,’ writes Marsh. ‘The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on the story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an eight-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first… Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.’
Marsh’s article rang a dismal bell. My son is lucky enough to have a headmistress who values proper reading and good books above all else, but for decades I’ve heard my friends with older children complain about this test-based method – and then also complain, without connecting the thoughts, that their kids don’t read for fun. For Marsh, the terrible result of the dour, assessment-based approach to literature is that children divide fiction into boring books and ‘fun’ books. The great works of literature are boring. The Goosebumps series and The Diary of a Wimpy Kid are ‘fun’ (and if that moaning maggot is what’s embedded in our children’s minds, no wonder they’re all depressed). Marsh didn’t mention Allan Bloom in her piece, though his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind anticipated and described the same problem to an astonishing degree. ‘When I first noticed the decline in reading during the late 1960s,’ he writes, ‘I began asking my students what books really count for them. Most of them are silent, puzzled by the question. The notion of books as company is foreign to them.’
If children don’t think of books as good company in the 21st century, it’s probably because books harangue them. So many are so tediously politicised, like the noxious (but bestselling) series Little People Big Dreams – about the lives of people such as Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Emmeline Pankhurst and Greta Thunberg – which aren’t stories but just mini-lectures parroting the approved line: stick it to the system, kids. Is this what children want to read, or just what their parents want to buy them? They’re not at any rate igniting a lifelong love of reading.
The old stories, the kind that we loved and that fed a desire to read more and more, were often written by authors who didn’t imagine that they were even writing for children, let alone indoctrinating them politically. ‘You have to write the book that wants to be written,’ said Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time). ‘And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups then you write it for children.’ By the by, for a wonderful overview of childhood reading, I very much recommend The Haunted Wood, just out, by The Spectator’s literary editor, Sam Leith.
It’s these living books, the ones that wanted to be written, which are often approached by people in the education business with the most nervous revulsion. I have a friend whose son has been warned off both Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton on the grounds that they’re outdated. In Scotland last summer I found a Biggles book with a warning from the publisher on page one: ‘This book has been reprinted for historical interest only. It is not recommended for children.’
My son’s favourite Blyton series stars a child investigator whose nickname is Fatty because his initials are F.A.T, and because he’s fat. ‘He’s not fat!’ explained my son earnestly and proved his point by reading out loud from the publisher’s note in his new edition: ‘All references to his size have been removed from the text dated 2016 so that Fatty’s nickname refers to his initials only.’
Children pick up cues quickly. They read these little notes and they get the message: do not engage with these authors and their dangerous stories. Resist the temptation to be immersed. Just read what you have to in order to pass the test, then hurry back to screentime.
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