I recently finished reading one of the book series that defined my childhood: Magician, Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon – Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar trilogy. Reading of the adventures of Pug, Tomas and the Mikidemians brought back that childhood exhilaration of riding through a horde of ugly, violent trolls on horseback, wielding a sword and seeking revenge on any enemy that got in my way. It also made me stand in awe as the sky was filled with sparks that were all colours of the rainbow as magicians bend the fabric of time and space to their will. Moreover, the plotting and intrigue of court politics was a grim reminder that not all are noble or honourable and that those who appear not to be often are. All this was relived on two imaginary worlds created by Feist and it reminded me of my love for fantasy fiction during my teenage years.
Unfortunately, if recent research trends are to be believed, I may be soon considered a museum piece for having experienced such excitement in print. In fact, there is a risk that the next generations will not only miss out on the exhilaration of reading a great adventure tale from another world but maybe more boring as a consequence. As an English teacher I find this disturbing but as a member of the human race it makes me terrified.
Reading the Sydney Morning Herald on my iPad yesterday, there was an article entitled “Don’t let technology stultify your brain – download a book” by Gail Rebuck. It started with the usual opening gambit of articles about reading: why bother? Mostly this is followed by the tired but not untrue argument about cultural heritage and that we can’t understand society unless we understand our past. However, this article instead pointed to research that suggests that reading plays an important role in developing neural pathways in the brain that leads to the development of empathy and a sense of self. This was an argument I hadn’t heard before and now I was hooked. It then continued on to suggest that a generation that read less would in fact change society itself by creating less intricate, empathic and interesting people. By this time I had noted the name of the book the research came from to download later. Finally, it promoted the use of tablets, e-readers and the internet as the future of reading that must be embraced: message over medium. Ironically, despite owning an iPad I still feel that paying for an e-book is a bridge too far. All up the article left me a little shaken: the future of the planet might be dependent on reading and we were losing the battle noticeably.
The main reason for my concern is what I observe daily in my job as an English teacher. Often when I introduce myself as such, people give me a wry look and boast about how the last book they read was in school. I used to think this was a worry because despite having to read a lot for my job, I always find time to read books that interest me. However, even more worrying now is the number of people who not only boast of not having picked up a book since school but also boast that they didn’t even have to read books to get through school! Thanks largely in part to the internet and the democratisation of information, there now exist multiple sites to help the lazy/struggling/uninterested student who doesn’t want to read their assigned text but still be able to pass an in-class or examination essay. These notes not only provide detailed plot analysis but even give you quotes to show that you have ‘read’ the text.
This epidemic is getting worse: in my recent senior English class I could count on one hand the students who actually read the entire text. The reason they gave me being that the film version was more accessible and English didn’t matter anyway. This proved incorrect as those who had read it shone through in the final exam but if this is any indication of the students to come I am definitely up against it.
One of the major reasons I think for this degradation of reading is the school system itself. As teachers we try to make reading accessible and user friendly for the students. This often means choosing softer text options that should be readable for all students so that staples of yesteryear such as a Bronte, Austin or Steinbeck get put to one side in favour of young adult fiction such as Marsden, Meyer and Rowling. In itself this is not a bad thing, choosing a text that can be differentiated for each student is a must for equitable classrooms so that all students get a chance to learn. However, we do ourselves a disservice when even this lower standard is flaunted and students fail to read even these simpler books. Where do we go next? Do we start setting magazines as major texts? Perhaps we should abandon the written word altogether and just watch movies?
The other major reason for this decline is parents themselves. Schools play a major role but are not the only ones responsible for a child’s education. In fact, a lot of the child’s attitudes and behaviours have been shaped before school even comes into contact with them and thus parents need to take their share of responsibility. While this avenue relates to almost every aspect of education (and warrants at least another essay in itself), this is particularly true of reading. Positive modelling, that is sitting down with a book on a daily basis for pleasure, is one of the best ways to encourage children to read. While in an ideal world this is done regularly at school, I hear stories of schools that incorporate this into their timetable and weep, an over-packed curriculum made busier by National Curriculum doesn’t provide this space. In fact, the only way I do it in my own classroom is to prioritise time away from other activities for reading. Thus parents need to be actively encouraging reading by providing opportunities to read and showing their children its value by doing it themselves.
Before I hear cries of I’m too busy or my child spends all their time on the computer, I have one thing to say: remember, you are the parent and they are the child. This may seem an odd statement but the number of kids who seem to control their own mobile phone and computer usage at home makes me wonder if the inmates are running the asylum. I’m often amazed at the parents who bemoan the fact that their child doesn’t get enough sleep because they spend most of the night texting or using social media such as Twitter of Facebook. I’m not a parent but eventually someone needs to take responsibility for the child’s action and contrary to popular belief it is NOT the schools.
So reading is in decline and the world faces a boring and less bright future for it. Is this concern new? Not really, Orwell wrote about this very topic in 1946. Speaking to workers he discovered that they would rather spend money on cigarettes than a book because the latter wasn’t worth it. In typical Orwellian fashion he wrote an essay on it and decided to run some figures to find out if it was so. Unsurprisingly for the writer and avid reader, he found that reading was not more expensive than smokes, the movies or the races but was in fact cheaper. The reason he came up with for the lack of reading in 1946: it was less exciting.
This is a simple answer but illuminating. Reading can be less exciting, particularly when children are directed to the shallow offerings of Twilight’s Meyer and Harry Potter’s Rowling. Much better that they are directed to more challenging texts (yes you may encounter poly-sibylic words that require a dictionary and complex sentence structures) that take them on grand adventures and don’t just pander to their limited imaginations. I would rather that they struggle through a classic such as Wuthering Heights than be left to run through the latest instalment of a Gossip Girl serial. Is it as enjoyable? By ‘enjoyable’ meaning fun: not really. However, the achievement of finishing such a novel has uncounted pleasures: the knowledge of overcoming a difficult task, expanding your vocabulary significantly and seeing that well crafted Literature takes time and patience. This is the true gift of reading, expanding those neurons, and something society can’t afford to lose.
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