SerpApi.Org
The decline of book-reading is a common lament. Parents, teachers, and penurious authors will all tell you that the love of reading is in retreat.
Statisticians at the National Literacy Trust say that in 2025 the number of children who enjoyed reading in their spare time sank to a 20-year low: a “generational challenge”, in their words.
Parliament’s education committee has released a report with various proposed remedies. At first blush, many of them seem worthy. Aside from the obligatory attack on screens and social media, the importance of making reading for pleasure a fundamental part of children’s experience is a constant refrain.
Parents, who themselves may have been poor readers, should be offered help at “Best Start Family Hubs”. Every secondary school should be provided with a library. Health visitors should encourage reading in young families.
And, to ensure that access to books is never a difficulty, every child at birth should automatically be given a local library card.
Yet, the more one considers these remedies, the more they seem like technocratic displacement activity. Proposed solutions often seem to tilt at problems which are overblown or illusory.
They also hint at a deeper absence of understanding about the true value of reading, and why people should be drawn to it.
Take the proposal for automatic universal provision of library cards for babies. This is based on the idea that it is difficult for those on low incomes to access books, and that they need the offer of the cards to draw them into the library system.
However, a stroll into any town shows that books are more available than ever for those who want them.
Not only is the local library still there (albeit with slightly erratic opening hours), but one can load up on all manner of tomes from the charity shop for pennies, or free at the now ubiquitous book-swap phone boxes.
Poverty has never been an impediment to reading. Jonathan Rose’s magisterial The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes reminds us that the poorest in their overcrowded terraces once voraciously read Milton, Chaucer and Gibbon. Blaming poverty is a cover for a more intractable modern lack of interest.
Will giving out a library card at birth, which will probably be put at the back of the kitchen drawer, actually spur uninterested parents or children into the library? Is this the best use of £7.5m, the estimated cost of the scheme?
One can offer as many of these technocratic tweaks to encourage reading as one likes, but without getting to the heart of what might compel people to read, it is all lost labour. It is here that the report truly comes unstuck.
Aside from vaunting reading for pleasure and its mental health and economic benefits, the report observes that reading helps children to understand the perspectives of others, as well as their own identity. Thus, it also supports social cohesion.
Yet, a number of the report’s own recommendations militate against this. It endorses various ideas that come from those who have called for the “decolonisation” of English teaching.
These include watering down the requirement for schools to teach Shakespeare and earlier novels in favour of contemporary texts from “diverse” backgrounds.
Reading is for wisdom as well as pleasure
The canonical authors are attacked for being uninspiring for schoolchildren. They are also dismissed as unsuitable, as they generally lack “diverse” characters, thereby preventing children of “diverse” backgrounds from identifying with them.
This belies the committee’s own principles. If children of any background wish to engage with an English or British identity which is conveyed through the literary canon, why should this be denied them?
And if literature encourages one to see the perspectives of others, can you only identify with them if you share the same superficial characteristics? Do I need to be a Prince of Denmark to identify with Hamlet?
Perhaps an English curriculum that was designed to give confused children a more confident sense of national identity, rather than breaking them up into identitarian fragments, might attract them back to books. But there is a profounder point.
It was never the pursuit of pleasure which drove the great growth of literacy at the Reformation. It was rather the new presence of scripture in English, for the first time widely available through the new medium of print.
People read because they believed that the scriptures, and the associated works of literature that grew from them, would bring them truth, knowledge of virtue, and access to a transcendent wisdom.
“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,” says the Good Book itself.
We live in an age where pleasure may be easily found, but not wisdom. If parliamentarians and educationists dared to promote literature not as one amusement amongst many, but a royal road to wisdom, perhaps the deracinated young might see its distinctive attraction.
But where are the teachers who speak of transcendent truths in the modern classroom, or parliamentarians who see wisdom as a policy objective?
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Bijan Omrani is the author of God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England
