The interest in reading books and the appreciation of English literature is at a nadir. This week it was revealed that only 35 per cent of eight to 18-year-olds enjoy reading in their spare time. The finding, by the National Literacy Trust, represents more than an 8 per cent per cent drop on last year, and the lowest level ever recorded by the charity since it began surveying children about their reading habits, 19 years ago. The drop has been especially pronounced among boys.
It also emerged that Canterbury Christ Church University is to scrap degrees in English literature because of a lack of demand in applicants. The establishment, in the Kent city which was the birthplace of Christopher Marlowe and a place forever associated with Geoffrey Chaucer, says the course is ‘no longer viable in the current climate’.
If we wish to instil a love of reading among young minds, we are going about it the wrong way
By ‘current climate’, the university is no doubt alluding to the financial crisis among universities, many of which expanded too ambitiously and recklessly after polytechnics were abolished in 1992. Tuition fees, and their rise this week, have since exacerbated the problem.
Yet there is a wider problem, and this stems from the literature children and teenagers are encouraged to read, and the manner in which this literature is taught. Reading is no longer valued for its intrinsic worth, but as a medium to instil political doctrine.
Books for children aren’t much fun these days, with so much of the fare on offer displaying a conspicuous capture by woke ideology. Parents perusing their local library or bookshop are met with grim evidence of this development. Popular titles include The Pronoun Book: The brand new illustrated picture book for 2022, There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom and My Skin, Your Skin: Let’s talk about race, racism and empowerment. What infant wouldn’t prefer to read instead a Mr. Men book? What older child wouldn’t rather escape with a Tintin or Harry Potter adventure?
Books placed in front of youngsters continue to be politicised until their late teens, when they enter university. These institutions have been traducing English literature in their courses for some time now, a trend merely exacerbated by the arrival of woke dogma in the mid-part of in the last decade and its subsequent entrenchment. This is epitomised by trigger warnings concerning ‘upsetting’ or ‘inappropriate’ content at the front of books and before lectures. Who would want to study English in this climate?
Already by the 1990s, it had become standard practice in higher education to explain Robinson Crusoe as a metaphor for imperialism of the white man, in which a coloniser recreates a version of European civilisation, replete with his own black man as a subservient. In that decade, a relative of mine took a mature degree in English literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where she was taught that Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens was a metaphor for patriarchy and colonialism, Mrs Bennet’s behaviour in Pride and Prejudice owed to her going through the menopause, and that D.H.Lawrence’s entire oeuvre was suffused with phallocentrism. She duly changed her course to French.
A contemporary of mine also went to study English literature in the 1990s – at Birmingham University – where her youthful passion for reading was almost extinguished by the surgical and ideological dissection of the classics.
If we wish to instil a love of reading among young minds, we are going about it the wrong way. One far more preferable method for engendering an interest in English is to encourage the young to read engaging and inspiring literature, and to appreciate art for its own sake. Before woke monomania took hold, JK Rowling achieved this feat in the first two decades of this century with her Harry Potters stories. Sure, they were old-fashioned, harking back to a world of boarding schools and stark discipline. And they were derivative, reliant on the monomyth as outlined by the Jungian anthropologist Joseph Campbell: that of the orphaned boy charged with a mission, who finds a companion or companions, is guided by a wizened sage before confronting the evil lord in his lair. That story is also Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, to name two examples. But the Harry Potter books were finely-crafted and endearing.
The old stories are often the best. Tales of adventure, daring, and the battle between good and evil always excite girls and boys – especially boys. The best way to arouse a passion for English is to teach from an early age stories that generate wonder and curiosity: from Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne to George Orwell and Ray Bradbury. A passion for English will ideally be implanted and maintained thereafter. Contrarily, the worst way to get people reading, and keep them reading into early adulthood, is to view this activity as a blunt means of social engineering.
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