Faulks: Students help themselves to degree without opening a book

IN HIS novel A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks wrote that if you want to know what lies behind the “flat screen” of other people’s lives then “you have to read a book”.

Yet according to the Birdsong author, increasing numbers of arts graduates are finding literature unnecessary to their education.

Speaking at the Henley Literary Festival at the weekend, Faulks warned that younger generations relied less on novels to learn about the world than their parents had and, as a result, were missing basic “factual knowledge”.

“I do think it’s possible to get a good degree from a university in an arts subject having read fewer books than used to be the case,” he told the audience.

“I have children in their 20s and they have been educated in a different way from people of my age. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but they are different.

“I’ve worked with people in their 20s and even those who are clever and with degrees from universities in arts subjects have hardly read any books, and they’ve hardly captured any factual knowledge. It’s not because they’re stupid, far from it.”

Figures from the Reading Agency found that 44per cent of young people aged 18-24 do not read for pleasure compared with 36 per cent of adults.

Faulks said he did not want to be “the sort of old geezer” who mourned how things were in the past, but warned that the way people accessed information was changing. He said it was “scary” that there appeared to have been a “complete loss of agreed truth” in society.

“You have one idiot in Washington and one idiot in Moscow making stuff up as they go along,” he added.

“I’m very much anti-authority, and I always have been, but you do have to accept that some things are true and some things are right and we have to agree on some things.

“We live in a world in which the person who shouts their version of things the loudest is the person most likely to be believed and that’s a really exciting, not to say dangerous and scary, world to be going into. Everyone has access to a voice through the internet and again that’s great, it’s democratisation, but what if they’re all shouting nonsense? How do we tell?”

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Birdsong, set during the First World War.

In preparation for writing the book, Faulks visited the Western Front with a group of First World War veterans. He said: “I remember standing with this old man and he said, ‘You’re standing just where my best friend was standing, that bit of mud. A shell blew him up into lots of different pieces and I put them all in a sandbag, each piece no bigger than a leg of mutton.’”

He said talking to these men “took the First World War out of history and brought it into the present” and “demystified” the war.

“These were just blokes, they were just you and me,” he said.

‘I have children in their 20s and they have been educated in a different way from people of my age’