Why aren’t kids reading anymore? Maybe because teachers treat them like children
By Steven Tucker, Mercator.
Mercator recently ran a piece, “101 Books Millennials Must Read Before They Die”. No chance of that happening according to a new report from the UK’s National Literacy Trust showing that, of 76,000 British schoolchildren surveyed, only a third said they enjoyed reading for pleasure, the lowest figure since such polls began in 2005.
Maybe this site should be more realistic and issue a follow-up article, “101 Long Words Millennials Must Read Before They Die” instead?
Earlier this year, I was disturbed to see my old university lecturer in English Literature Sir Jonathan Bate complaining the students who come to him no longer enjoy the discipline to read long books any more. I used to enjoy Bate’s old lectures on Renaissance Literature, in which he would causally recommend we went away and read Montaigne’s Essays – all 1,269 pages of them. Personally, I’m glad I took his advice. Nowadays, he might be advising undergraduates to go away and read the Collected Works of Topsy & Tim instead.
Speaking to the BBC, Bate complained that “I’ve been teaching in British and American universities for 40 years, and when I began in Cambridge, you could say to students ‘this week, it’s Dickens, so please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House’. Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.”
Bate blamed schools for this, and “the tendency to prescribe works because they’re shorter”, but also noted that “the very desirable idea of getting more students from disadvantaged backgrounds” into universities, rather than simply those with the best prior exam results, as in the past, played its role too. “Because those students come from disadvantaged schools where the teacher’s main task is crowd control, the demands in terms of reading long books are just not there.” That’s equity for you: lowering the standards of all to pander to those of the least able. Maybe this goal isn’t quite so “very desirable” after all, then, but deeply self-defeating?