The Sunday Times is starting a campaign to get children reading for pleasure once again. Teachers would offer many reasons why this has become a national crisis, largely because of the intense pressure put on the curriculum and lessons that have to be taught to the test but as always it is complicated and as much to do with home as school, made more difficult still by our added reliance on screens.
They, The Sunday Times, chose the author Katherine Rundell to write the lengthy article launching this project. Oh my goodness, what an excellent choice. She is just the right person. If anyone can engage others in the fundamental importance of children reading for pleasure, then it is her.
The article is beautifully written and thus a joy to read simply for that reason but what she has to say and the ideas she puts forward are powerful and indeed riveting. I so want you to read this article but I can give you just a flavour:
‘Galileo was not only the father of observational astronomy, and the owner of a pair of unusually abundant eyebrows. He was also the author of one of our finest accounts of what it is to read and write. “ What sublimity of mind was his,” he marvelled,“ who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and time!”
The written word can leap across continents, he wrote, and reach “those who are not yet born for a thousand or ten thousand years”. And it does that simply “by the different arrangements of twenty characters upon a page!”
What Galileo captured was the sorcery of reading: an alchemic power that goes much further than just enabling communication, particularly for children.
Because if there is a silver bullet for ordinary, everyday childhood happiness, it is reading for pleasure.
I could of course go on but if you are interested then you must be able to find this article somewhere on line, if you can’t lay your hands on a paper copy.
I do though refuse to be utterly disconsolate about this situation. All through my very happy childhood I don’t recall ever seeing either of my parents read a book, newspapers and magazines but not a book, not a story and yet somehow through my own volition the words on those pages have become vital to my happiness.