‘Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.’
So says Scout Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, when her teacher, Miss Caroline, tells her to stop reading with her father.
The reasons? He has taught her to read words that Miss Caroline deems too difficult for her age, and he is teaching her in a way that is at odds with Miss Caroline’s own teaching methods.
Why does Miss Caroline not take note of the ‘methods’ Atticus has used to produce one of the most advanced readers in the class? Why is Miss Caroline so against ‘difficult’ words? And what is Miss Caroline hoping to gain by blocking reading?
I wish I had Miss Caroline’s problem. Instead of trying to hold back readers, I am endlessly trying to push them forward.
It appears I am in a minority. University professors – teaching English literature, mind you – report how little their students read.
The students have not only not read much and do not read much but, worst of all, they are not willing to read much.
If that is the state with university students who have chosen literature as their subject, imagine how rarely others open a book.
Who is to blame? Professor Sir Jonathan Bate called it the Of Mice and Men effect. For years (until Gove kicked American literature out of the exam curriculum), this was the book chosen by schools for GCSE. It’s powerful, accessible – and short. For many pupils, it is the only novel they will ever read.
My old head of department told me with pride how her hairdresser, an ex-pupil, still took Of Mice and Men on holiday every year to reread it. When I asked why she didn’t buy the hairdresser something else for her next holiday – The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps – she looked at me, slightly stunned at the idea.
been chosen for its brevity. The 19th-century novel is nearly always A Christmas Carol. The Shakespeare text is usually Macbeth. America is worse than us, though: a pupil can go through the whole of high school without ever studying a whole book.
How can we change this trend? We want our students to pass their exams – so we make the easy choices – but shouldn’t we be doing more than that?
I have just finished teaching the ubiquitous Of Mice and Men to my Year 8 class (we still have the copies in the cupboard, after all). We have spent some of the Glorious Benefactor’s money on The Grapes of Wrath for a few of the pupils whose faces lit up every time we opened the novel. In Year 9, we have been studying a brilliant novel about drug cartels in Mexico (Saint Death by Marcus Sedgwick). For the first time ever, nearly the entire class raised their
hands when I asked who had enjoyed the book. So the Glorious Benefactor is about to go shopping again.
But not every teacher – or every school – has a Glorious Benefactor lurking in the shadows.
So this is what we should do. We need to talk about reading. We need to be seen to read. We need to lend our own books and push children towards the library. We need to talk to parents about children’s reading. We need to set aside more time for children to read.
I try to give children a regular half- hour in which to read. While they are doing this, I have a slideshow quietly on. It is made up of paintings and photographs of people reading, over which quotations about reading are superimposed.
It begins with Harper Lee’s quotation. Somehow, we need more children to feel like Scout.
