Philip Womack has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate recently claimed that students are struggling to read long books. Depressingly, he’s right. I could have told him the same thing five years ago, when I was teaching at a well-respected Russell Group university. The problem isn’t that students won’t read Moby-Dick in five days. It’s that even if you give them what they want, they’ll still find fault. This all points to a tussle at the heart of modern education: do you cave in to the blighters, or not?
To my surprise, when convening a BA course on children’s literature, I discovered that some of my students balked at reading children’s books. The course looked at the whole caboodle from the Romantics to the present day. It wasn’t a doss: the reading included knotty stuff like Rousseau, as well as all the primary texts. Most students seemed to enjoy it. Why wouldn’t they? Aslan and Bilbo Baggins! It was also intellectually stimulating, with literary, politico-ideological and biographical elements to absorb.
One day, after giving a lecture on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, I waited for questions. Several hands shot up. ‘Do we have to read all the books?’ came the first inquiry. ‘Yes,’ I laughed. ‘All seven?’ was the plaintive response. I answered, firmly, that it was Potter week, they’d had the reading list since June, and if they wanted to write their final essays on Potter, they’d have to refer to all seven: we’d been discussing the series as a Bildungsroman.
Later, an email pinged in. There had been complaints. Four, to be precise, from students who thought I had unfairly dismissed their concerns.
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