Social media has helped estrange a generation from the wonders of reading literature

ONLY once during my childhood was I told that I was too young to read a book. It was Elvis by Albert Goldman, a biographer so brutally unsympathetic to the subjects of his prose that his very name became a byword for hatchet job.

Goldman was too intent on demythologising the King to pause and reflect on his sublime talent. I doubt he ever truly loved any Elvis song.

At 12 years old, I loved plenty of them. I should wait a while, so the parental counsel went, before immersing myself in the 600-page thesis that Elvis was a witless slob who couldn’t stop eating hamburgers.

I waited some 40 years, gave it a hundred pages or so and put it down. I was too old to waste precious time on Goldman’s unremitting meanness.

If my dad’s advice was a precursor to the modern trigger warning then it was, at least, a discerning one. My English teachers were discerning too in that they didn’t give any.

Absorbed

I remember being confronted with Evans, the dying peasant the poet RS Thomas left stranded on the ‘lonely shore of his bleak bed’. We did the war poets and absorbed the gut-wrenching fact that, not long after Wilfred Owen penned his searing verses on the horrors of the Great War, he succumbed to them.

They gave us a poem by Robert Frost where a teenager with a buzz saw cuts his arm off and dies and we were sufficiently au fait with Shakespeare to understand that the title, Out, Out–, was an allusion to Macbeth.

‘Out, out, brief candle!’ says the eponymous hero after the death of Lady Macbeth. The lines which follow, which we learned at 15 for O-Grade English, are surely among the most profound and timeless ever written. ‘Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage…’

These and other literary treasures spring to mind this week as we learn that the reading age of the average 16-year-old school pupil is just 13 and that comprehension abilities over the past 15 years have been in steady decline.

A question arises, too: what are they reading?

Well, a study in which more than 40,000 Scottish children were surveyed found they often opt for books no more challenging than those they read in primary school.

Particular favourites among all age-groups questioned include David Walliams’s Billionaire Boy, whose cover suggests it was designed with the under-sevens market in mind, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney, which styles itself as ‘a novel in cartoons’.

I do not suggest that, at 16, I was devouring Dickens or Austen in my free time. It is true that light reads such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ were on my radar alongside more rewarding ones such as Catch-22.

But, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d certainly suggest the reading matter we were presented with at school was, in the main, far more valuable and memorable than my leisure reading.

As teenagers we were challenged with adult themes, handed weighty tomes with featureless covers and zero illustrations in their pages and told to get stuck in.

Nothing we read at secondary was aimed at children or young adults. We were big boys and girls now and our school reading lists reflected it.

And, as we absorbed this ‘compulsory’ literature – from kitchen sink dramatists to pastoral poets and on to existential novelists – so our own choices in reading matter evolved into something approaching maturity.

How is that going in modern secondary education? Badly, one must surmise, in view of the fact teenagers’ reading age is stuck in reverse.

There is a raft of reasons why the brief candle of opportunity to instil in teenagers a love of reading and quality reading matter flickers out too quickly.

They are, from the tenderest age, raised to believe that reading is something they do on their phones where their favourite things to look at are rendered in the poorest writing.

Mistakes

Their devices estrange them from books, remove them from a world where children used to read by torch under the duvet after lights out because their imaginations were wide awake.

They regurgitate the mistakes in the illiterate prose on their phones and, much of the time, their teachers don’t pick them up on it. This has been going on for almost a generation. Many of them don’t know any better either.

Social media – and increasingly mainstream media – is awash with appalling grammar and words deployed to mean something they don’t. Don’t get me started on ‘crescendo’. Even in my own trade, almost everyone who uses the word demonstrates their ignorance of what a crescendo is.

Don’t make me dwell on the horrors heard daily on the BBC – senior reporters who think people were ‘stood there’ rather than ‘standing there’, who use ‘less’ when it should be ‘fewer’, ‘I’ when it should be ‘me’ and think ‘has went’ are words which have any business standing together in a sentence.

I blame mobile phones and teachers and the wrong books. I blame the wrongheaded imperative to dial back on the dusty old classics which were included on syllabuses for generations and plump instead for the new and socially relevant and, most of all, unproblematic.

It seems to me that when a pupil tells a teacher Thomas

Hardy doesn’t speak to him about his life he is today simply believed. He ought to be contradicted, challenged to reflect on the universality of the themes. That very process of comprehension through close reading is crumbling.

And I blame the universities, esteemed seats of higher learning which now see fit to warn literature students of the ‘graphic fishing scenes’ in Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea and that there will be ‘monsters’ in the Old English poem Beowulf.

Indeed I wonder if the lunacy of trigger warnings – which recently extended to Aberdeen University alerting students to the fact the RL Stevenson novel Kidnapped contains depictions of kidnapping – may be the biggest culprits of all in the decline in reading comprehension.

If academics are willing to be bossed around by students terrified of reading something that upsets them, what chance does the average 16-year-old stand of being challenged by literature which cuts through the adolescent torpor?

Sanitised

Were we emotionally ready to hear that ‘life’s but a walking shadow’ in O-Grade English? I think so. For the other thing about life is, ready or not, here it comes. And, back then, there was an assumption that education was preparing us for it.

In the sanitised and decidedly ‘on-message’ reading matter placed in children’s hands today, are we not sheltering them from it?

There may be no way back for grammar, for vocabulary either. Language is a living thing, so if enough people misunderstand what a crescendo is the dictionaries in time will misunderstand too. Grammar books will ultimately relent on ‘stood there’, though not in my lifetime I hope.

The classics, on the other hand, were built to last. That’s why they became classics. David Walliams’ frivolities will not number among them and he will find himself, as Albert Goldman did, out of print.

That is important context for schools to give – for reasons of comprehension and all.