The best devices are books

As World Book Day approaches, we and our kids need to read, read, read

Reading that doesn’t immediately spark joy is the best kind.

So says Philip Womack in a piece for The Spectator, in which he asks ‘Is it really too much to ask student’s to read children’s books?’. Basically, they had kicked up a fuss because he had expected his undergraduates - who were studying children’s literature - to read the Harry Potter books. Surely not an unreasonable expectation? To cut a long story short, they won. If teenagers supposedly interested in the subject can’t see the point of reading books for children a good deal younger than themselves, what hope is there of actual children being persuaded that reading is worth the bother?

While I haven’t got my kids interested yet, I recently enjoyed Treasure Island. With piracy all the rage in the Red Sea, it’s a genre surely due another a revival? It is a love of reading that I have now, but never had as a child, that I want to instil in my own kids. There is resistance, of course. But when it happens, when you share those moments with them and a book, particularly when they’re younger - it’s quite special. One way or another, I plan on gobbling up the children’s literary canon and entering into the imaginative world of its eternal characters so beloved by so many. Even if I end up reading bedtime stories - as novelist Kate Weinberg movingly recalls her father reading to her - to myself.

The latest evidence suggests the little ones are reading less and less all the time. Which rather reminds me of what my older cousin, an educationalist and author, wrote about an experience we shared early on in her career. In a fascinating book that she co-authored with her game designer son Chris, A Brilliant IQ: Gift or Challenge?, Lyn had this to say about me being her first student all those years ago,

Shortly after school began, David started refusing to read. When I arrived to babysit I’d find the books the school had sent home lying untouched on the table - in hindsight, I suspect this refusal stemmed from boredom, as he already knew how to read them perfectly well. Instead, we’d read the book backwards, or read across both pages at once, playing with the words themselves to make them fun again.

It’s a challenge I, and other parents, are faced with too. How do we make books attractive? It’s partly our fault. Being one, I’m not one to blame parents. But we really could try harder. World Book Day is around the corner and my first thought is, admittedly, ‘what films do they like?’ It’s the middle class parents who grew up reading and who can afford to shell out on a new costume every year, or have the time to (shock, horror!) make one. For the rest of us, it could be superheroes again. And, as Mary Wakefield has observed,

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?

But she also cites the author and editor Katherine Marsh who goes beyond blaming phones and social media for our children’s lack of reading. As Wakefield puts it, ‘the endless focus on analysis and the lack of enthusiasm for story’ is behind their lack of enthusiasm for books and particularly fiction. It is the way it is taught - in chunks, out of context, with one eye (if not both) on the next test, as a chore rather than as something to be enjoyed, something that might spark the imagination. But this isn’t exactly new. Wakefield also cites the great Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind - which, as I’ve said before, was responsible for opening mine as a young man. In it, she reminds us, Bloom remembers his students in the 1960s just not getting his bibliophilia.

While they are told to steer clear of Dahl and Blyton, many of the books kids are urged to read these days are more like ‘mini-lectures’ she concludes. Indeed, you might say that the very books they’re not supposed to read are the one’s they really, really should. Their views might be outdated or even downright wrong, but they’re almost always better books written by better authors. Even nursery rhymes are rewritten to suit the uptight and politically correct sensibilities of today’s sensitive censors, intent on depriving our youngest readers of a bit of rhyming mischief. It’s all very dispiriting for those of us who are rather fond of the edgy appeal of the best children’s writing.

It’s not that children shouldn’t be interested in politics and current affairs either. The Adventures of Tintin mapped and often, according to Michael Farr, even anticipated the great events of that turbulent century. We could do with something like that in our own era of convulsive change. An account of the times we are living in, that appeals to young people’s sense of possibility, is surely better than stories that are saturated in the divisive, deceiving and sometimes downright dangerous politics of identity? Tintin’s adventures took kids out of themselves and helped them understand the world around them.

There’s nothing to be gained from an overbearing obsession with the self. Much better that we encourage the next generation to set sail and battle against the elements. As Smollett puts it in Treasure Island: ‘We must go on, because we can't turn back.’

Image: IAEA Imagebank