Meanwhile, this side of the Channel, in a long piece in the Telegraph last month, we were reminded, as we often are at this time of year, how involvement in reading books has been declining in recent years. In the case of adults, a YouGov poll earlier in the year found 40% reporting they had not read or listened to a single book in the previous year and 50% reporting that they had not bought one.
For children, a survey by the National Literacy Trust showed an all-time low in their enjoyment of reading, with only 32.7% saying that they enjoyed reading in their free time.
Internationally, we may have been holding our own in ensuring that most children achieve satisfactory levels of functional literacy, as England’s PISA results and rankings have shown, but what we have not been doing is reversing the decline of their interest in reading and the time they spend doing it. We particularly lag behind many other countries in getting children to feel enthusiastic about reading, with only a dismally low 29% in England saying they “very much like” to read, compared with an international average of 46%.
Given that we already have more than enough ‘crises’ to contend with, I am not sure whether adding ‘the reading crisis’ to the list, as the National Literacy Trust and National Reading Agency both do, is sensible. There is a very small number of people who still lack basic literacy and a much larger number, estimated at c. 20%, who lack functional literacy. The latter problem must be addressed and is resolvable. If there is a reading crisis, however, it is more of a cultural one and one that is much less easily resolved.
For most of our history, from Hebraic and Greco–Roman times onwards, the book (in all its physical forms) has been a way of helping one to think about the big issues in life and a route to mental and ethical self-improvement. It has been at the heart of the ‘high culture’ that has brought us Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, modernism and all the book-based post-modern ideologies over which we are currently at war. If even our brightest young people are finding it increasingly difficult to read – as we are hearing even from tutors in top universities – is all that cultural heritage going to continue to be studied, critiqued and transmitted to future generations and, if not, how are future generations going to be able to build new things in the absence of these foundations?
This was the theme of the sociologist Frank Furedi’s Power of Reading. From Socrates to Twitter, which laments the way in which the former centrality of reading has been displaced by a utilitarian emphasis on functional literacy. It is an emphasis he traces back to the 19th Century but which he sees as increasingly dominant from the 1960s. Its effects are to transform schools into mere “sites for skills training”. In the face of this challenge, he argues, “rediscovering the virtues of reading” – reading that makes one think about how to live one’s life and come to terms with one’s death – constitutes one of the most significant cultural objectives of modern times.
Throughout history, this culture of reading was very much the affair of an elite. It was only in the latter part of the 19th Century, with mass publishing and the introduction of state elementary education, that access to high standards of literacy began to be extended to the whole of the population. This was the period when, with the middle and upper classes setting the example, working men and women up and down the country were inspired to buy copies of Dickens, Bunyan, Ruskin and others with a view to educating themselves. What is so sad today – and, if you want a crisis, this really is one – is our failure to convince not just the mass of the population but also much of the elite of “the virtues of reading”, as Furedi has described them, at a time when we have means at our disposal to help with this never previously imagined.
The current threat to literature and reading is the return-to-school message of the French magazine L’incorrect that I mentioned earlier. Its leading article is a conversation about reading between philosopher Alan Finkielkraut, critic Éric Naulleau and novelist Patrice Jean. Their worry is not about the number of books. There are indeed too many of these, they say, including 484 new novels in the current rentrée littéraire, many of which, according to L’incorrect, completely lack any kind of literary ambition, parrot all the clichés of the day and deserve only to be pulped.
They are also less worried than we might be about schools, taking it for granted that pupils will be going back this term to their lycée to read Balzac, Racine and Montaigne (pay attention to that, Bridget Phillipson). The problem is that what happens in schools is not valued outside them. Most children do not go home to an environment in which their studies are highly regarded as of value in themselves, even among the traditional bearers of cultural transmission, the bourgeoisie. The old cultured class has given way to a new elite – the one we know only too well in England – that “thinks itself rebellious” because it has nothing but contempt for the inheritance of past centuries and “imagines itself morally superior to everything that preceded it”.
Epitomes of this derided elite are Jack Lang, former Culture minister who turned the post into one responsible for “anything you decide to call culture” as long as it isn’t ‘culture’ in the traditional sense, and Emmanuel Macron, who in 2017 proclaimed that there was no such thing as a “French culture” but that there was “a culture in France, and it is diverse”. Despite this, Finkielkraut sees the main threats to reading, which go back to the early 20th Century, to have been economic and technological rather than political: cinema, radio, television and now internet and social media. All this has pushed serious reading – the kind of reading that the great critic F.R. Leavis was always searching for, where the book helps you to grapple with “the meaning of existence” – to the margins of our lives, if not out of them altogether.
To Finkielkraut and his two colleagues, the future looks grim. They liken the disappearance, book by book and author by author, from people’s consciousness of parts of France’s literary heritage to the loss each time of a living species. They agree that there are some good contemporary writers, but feel that France has drifted into a “post-literature” world and that the future will look increasingly similar to the old Communist dictatorships and become one in which, away from the universities, literary institutions and bookshops which have succumbed to wokeism, literature will only survive “in the catacombs”.
Is there an alternative to this rather over-the-top French pessimism? Some of the recent suggestions, this side of the Channel, made to encourage people to read – Reader’s Digest bite-sized Fiction Favourites, football fiction, a TikTok book club for the “morbidly curious”, AI-generated 15-minute audio summaries of books (knocking off “Bleak House while walking the dog”) – might well be a route back to books for some people, but the Gallic disdain they would rightly encounter is only too imaginable.
There are three things that could be done. One is immediate, the other two longterm.
First, we need to step up the fight against cultural institutions, publishers, bookshops, libraries and universities that act like political commissars, limiting our access to some of the books – including the ones aborted long before they ever get anywhere near the printing presses – we might otherwise have been able to read.
Second, we need to recover the idea – still lurking within our national curriculum – that schools are about transmitting knowledge and a cultural heritage, not indoctrinating children into the issues of the day. We need more classic texts, not fewer, and history for everyone to 16, as in some other countries (Bridget Phillipson, please note).
Third, we must go right back to the original idea of the university as providing a broad ‘liberal education’ for everyone, alongside their specialism, as John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman recommended and as the new University of Austin, Texas, among others, is putting into practice, and in which one still reads ‘great books’. Only in this way can we recreate the kind of elite we ought to have and that might one day show us again how we ought to read.
Dr Nicholas Tate was chief adviser on Curriculum and Assessment to England’s Secretaries of State for Education 1994–2000 and an adviser to French education ministers 2001–2007. He is currently Adviser to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary. This article was sourced HERE
For children, a survey by the National Literacy Trust showed an all-time low in their enjoyment of reading, with only 32.7% saying that they enjoyed reading in their free time.
Internationally, we may have been holding our own in ensuring that most children achieve satisfactory levels of functional literacy, as England’s PISA results and rankings have shown, but what we have not been doing is reversing the decline of their interest in reading and the time they spend doing it. We particularly lag behind many other countries in getting children to feel enthusiastic about reading, with only a dismally low 29% in England saying they “very much like” to read, compared with an international average of 46%.
Given that we already have more than enough ‘crises’ to contend with, I am not sure whether adding ‘the reading crisis’ to the list, as the National Literacy Trust and National Reading Agency both do, is sensible. There is a very small number of people who still lack basic literacy and a much larger number, estimated at c. 20%, who lack functional literacy. The latter problem must be addressed and is resolvable. If there is a reading crisis, however, it is more of a cultural one and one that is much less easily resolved.
For most of our history, from Hebraic and Greco–Roman times onwards, the book (in all its physical forms) has been a way of helping one to think about the big issues in life and a route to mental and ethical self-improvement. It has been at the heart of the ‘high culture’ that has brought us Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, modernism and all the book-based post-modern ideologies over which we are currently at war. If even our brightest young people are finding it increasingly difficult to read – as we are hearing even from tutors in top universities – is all that cultural heritage going to continue to be studied, critiqued and transmitted to future generations and, if not, how are future generations going to be able to build new things in the absence of these foundations?
This was the theme of the sociologist Frank Furedi’s Power of Reading. From Socrates to Twitter, which laments the way in which the former centrality of reading has been displaced by a utilitarian emphasis on functional literacy. It is an emphasis he traces back to the 19th Century but which he sees as increasingly dominant from the 1960s. Its effects are to transform schools into mere “sites for skills training”. In the face of this challenge, he argues, “rediscovering the virtues of reading” – reading that makes one think about how to live one’s life and come to terms with one’s death – constitutes one of the most significant cultural objectives of modern times.
Throughout history, this culture of reading was very much the affair of an elite. It was only in the latter part of the 19th Century, with mass publishing and the introduction of state elementary education, that access to high standards of literacy began to be extended to the whole of the population. This was the period when, with the middle and upper classes setting the example, working men and women up and down the country were inspired to buy copies of Dickens, Bunyan, Ruskin and others with a view to educating themselves. What is so sad today – and, if you want a crisis, this really is one – is our failure to convince not just the mass of the population but also much of the elite of “the virtues of reading”, as Furedi has described them, at a time when we have means at our disposal to help with this never previously imagined.
The current threat to literature and reading is the return-to-school message of the French magazine L’incorrect that I mentioned earlier. Its leading article is a conversation about reading between philosopher Alan Finkielkraut, critic Éric Naulleau and novelist Patrice Jean. Their worry is not about the number of books. There are indeed too many of these, they say, including 484 new novels in the current rentrée littéraire, many of which, according to L’incorrect, completely lack any kind of literary ambition, parrot all the clichés of the day and deserve only to be pulped.
They are also less worried than we might be about schools, taking it for granted that pupils will be going back this term to their lycée to read Balzac, Racine and Montaigne (pay attention to that, Bridget Phillipson). The problem is that what happens in schools is not valued outside them. Most children do not go home to an environment in which their studies are highly regarded as of value in themselves, even among the traditional bearers of cultural transmission, the bourgeoisie. The old cultured class has given way to a new elite – the one we know only too well in England – that “thinks itself rebellious” because it has nothing but contempt for the inheritance of past centuries and “imagines itself morally superior to everything that preceded it”.
Epitomes of this derided elite are Jack Lang, former Culture minister who turned the post into one responsible for “anything you decide to call culture” as long as it isn’t ‘culture’ in the traditional sense, and Emmanuel Macron, who in 2017 proclaimed that there was no such thing as a “French culture” but that there was “a culture in France, and it is diverse”. Despite this, Finkielkraut sees the main threats to reading, which go back to the early 20th Century, to have been economic and technological rather than political: cinema, radio, television and now internet and social media. All this has pushed serious reading – the kind of reading that the great critic F.R. Leavis was always searching for, where the book helps you to grapple with “the meaning of existence” – to the margins of our lives, if not out of them altogether.
To Finkielkraut and his two colleagues, the future looks grim. They liken the disappearance, book by book and author by author, from people’s consciousness of parts of France’s literary heritage to the loss each time of a living species. They agree that there are some good contemporary writers, but feel that France has drifted into a “post-literature” world and that the future will look increasingly similar to the old Communist dictatorships and become one in which, away from the universities, literary institutions and bookshops which have succumbed to wokeism, literature will only survive “in the catacombs”.
Is there an alternative to this rather over-the-top French pessimism? Some of the recent suggestions, this side of the Channel, made to encourage people to read – Reader’s Digest bite-sized Fiction Favourites, football fiction, a TikTok book club for the “morbidly curious”, AI-generated 15-minute audio summaries of books (knocking off “Bleak House while walking the dog”) – might well be a route back to books for some people, but the Gallic disdain they would rightly encounter is only too imaginable.
There are three things that could be done. One is immediate, the other two longterm.
First, we need to step up the fight against cultural institutions, publishers, bookshops, libraries and universities that act like political commissars, limiting our access to some of the books – including the ones aborted long before they ever get anywhere near the printing presses – we might otherwise have been able to read.
Second, we need to recover the idea – still lurking within our national curriculum – that schools are about transmitting knowledge and a cultural heritage, not indoctrinating children into the issues of the day. We need more classic texts, not fewer, and history for everyone to 16, as in some other countries (Bridget Phillipson, please note).
Third, we must go right back to the original idea of the university as providing a broad ‘liberal education’ for everyone, alongside their specialism, as John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman recommended and as the new University of Austin, Texas, among others, is putting into practice, and in which one still reads ‘great books’. Only in this way can we recreate the kind of elite we ought to have and that might one day show us again how we ought to read.
Dr Nicholas Tate was chief adviser on Curriculum and Assessment to England’s Secretaries of State for Education 1994–2000 and an adviser to French education ministers 2001–2007. He is currently Adviser to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary. This article was sourced HERE
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