Why Has Reading Been on the Decline
I t'southward of import for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might exist biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. And so, I am going to be talking to you almost reading. I'g going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the nearly important things one can do. I'1000 going to brand an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.
And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I'thou an author, oft an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about xxx years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them downwardly. It is manifestly in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and assistance foster a love of reading and places in which reading tin occur.
Then I'yard biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more than biased as a British citizen.
And I'yard here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give anybody an equal chance in life past helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.
And it's that alter, and that human action of reading that I'm here to talk about tonight. I want to talk nearly what reading does. What it's good for.
I was in one case in New York, and I listened to a talk almost the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison house industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they institute they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on request what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.
It'due south not i to 1: y'all can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very existent correlations.
And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.
Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to desire to turn the page, the demand to go along going, even if information technology'due south hard, because someone'southward in trouble and yous take to know how information technology's all going to terminate … that's a very real bulldoze. And information technology forces yous to larn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To notice that reading per se is pleasurable. Once yous acquire that, yous're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises fabricated briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that nosotros were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more than important than they ever were: we navigate the globe with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot substitution ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs simply go so far.
The simplest style to brand certain that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activeness. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them admission to those books, and letting them read them.
I don't call up there is such a thing as a bad volume for children. Every at present and over again it becomes fashionable among some adults to indicate at a subset of children's books, a genre, possibly, or an writer, and to declare them bad books, books that children should exist stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was alleged a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.
It's tosh. It's snobbery and information technology'due south foolishness. At that place are no bad authors for children, that children similar and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out thought isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading considering yous experience they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may adopt. And not everyone has the aforementioned taste as you.
Well-pregnant adults can hands destroy a child's dear of reading: finish them reading what they relish, or give them worthy-only-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind upwards with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
We need our children to become onto the reading ladder: anything that they savour reading will move them upwards, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not practice what this author did when his xi-year-former daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen Rex'southward Carrie, saying if yous liked those you lot'll love this! Holly read null simply safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.)
And the second affair fiction does is to build empathy. When y'all watch Boob tube or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and yous, and y'all alone, using your imagination, create a globe and people information technology and await out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You lot larn that anybody else out there is a me, likewise. You're being someone else, and when yous render to your ain world, you lot're going to exist slightly inverse.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing usa to function every bit more than self-obsessed individuals.
You're as well finding out something as you read vitally important for making your mode in the world. And it's this:
The world doesn't accept to be similar this. Things can be different.
I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It'southward uncomplicated, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did non innovate and they did non invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the Usa, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they institute that all of them had read scientific discipline fiction when they were boys or girls.
Fiction can evidence you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you lot've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never exist entirely content with the world that you grew upwards in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them improve, leave them dissimilar.
And while nosotros're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about every bit if it'southward a bad affair. Equally if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't yous have it? And escapist fiction is merely that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives y'all a place to go where y'all are in command, are with people you lot desire to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can too give you lot knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can accept dorsum into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you tin can use to escape for real.
As JRR Tolkien reminded u.s.a., the merely people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Another mode to destroy a child's dearest of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not listen a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning time and working his manner through the menu catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books.
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They but seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little male child who loved to read, and would talk to me most the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me equally some other reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect equally an eight-year-old.
But libraries are almost liberty. Freedom to read, liberty of ideas, freedom of communication. They are almost education (which is not a process that finishes the solar day nosotros leave school or academy), about amusement, about making prophylactic spaces, and almost access to data.
I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem blowsy or outdated in a globe in which most, simply non all, books in impress be digitally. But that is to miss the signal fundamentally.
I recollect information technology has to do with nature of data. Information has value, and the correct information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed data was always of import, and ever worth something: when to institute crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a repast and company. Information was a valuable matter, and those who had it or could obtain it could accuse for that service.
In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economic system to 1 driven by an data glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the man race creates as much information every bit we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That'southward about five exobytes of data a twenty-four hours, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce found growing in the desert, merely finding a specific found growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that data to notice the matter we actually demand.
Libraries are places that people become to for data. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More than children are borrowing books from libraries than e'er before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have net connections, tin can go online without paying annihilation: hugely of import when the way you lot find out nearly jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians tin assistance these people navigate that world.
I do non believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: every bit Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are former: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at existence sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and at that place will always be a identify for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already go places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.
A library is a identify that is a repository of information and gives every denizen equal access to information technology. That includes wellness information. And mental wellness information. It's a community infinite. It's a identify of safety, a haven from the world. It'southward a identify with librarians in it. What the libraries of the time to come will be similar is something we should exist imagining now.
Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this globe of text and email, a earth of written information. Nosotros need to read and write, we demand global citizens who tin read comfortably, cover what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.
Libraries really are the gates to the future. So information technology is unfortunate that, round the earth, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to salvage money, without realising that they are stealing from the futurity to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.
According to a recent study past the Organisation for Economical Cooperation and Development, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, subsequently other factors, such as gender, socio-economical backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into business relationship".
Or to put it another style, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the earth, to understand information technology to solve issues. They tin be more easily lied to and misled, volition be less able to change the earth in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And every bit a country, England will fall behind other adult nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.
Books are the style that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has congenital on itself, progressed, fabricated knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.
I call back we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will get, to the earth they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – equally readers, as writers, as citizens – accept obligations. I thought I'd endeavour and spell out some of these obligations here.
I believe nosotros have an obligation to read for pleasure, in individual and in public places. If we read for pleasance, if others encounter us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We testify others that reading is a skilful thing.
Nosotros have an obligation to support libraries. To utilize libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you practise not value libraries then you lot do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the by and you lot are damaging the future.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they savour. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To exercise the voices, to make it interesting, and not to finish reading to them only because they acquire to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the earth are put aside.
We have an obligation to utilize the language. To button ourselves: to discover out what words hateful and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what nosotros mean. We must not to try to freeze linguistic communication, or to pretend information technology is a dead thing that must be revered, simply we should use information technology as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.
We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – accept an obligation to our readers: information technology'due south the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We take an obligation not to bore our readers, but to brand them demand to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot terminate themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers truthful things and requite them weapons and requite them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green globe, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, non to forcefulness predigested morals and letters down our readers' throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would non desire to read ourselves.
Nosotros have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing of import work, because if nosotros mess information technology up and write slow books that turn children away from reading and from books, we 've lessened our own future and diminished theirs.
We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We take an obligation to imagine. It is like shooting fish in a barrel to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a globe in which society is huge and the individual is less than zip: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. Just the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals brand the future, and they practice information technology by imagining that things can be dissimilar.
Expect around you: I mean it. Intermission, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'grand going to bespeak out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some bespeak, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit down on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a style that I could talk to you in London right now without united states of america all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.
Nosotros have an obligation to make things cute. Non to leave the world uglier than nosotros constitute information technology, not to empty the oceans, non to go out our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean upward after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world nosotros've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.
We take an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote confronting politicians of any political party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to deed to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a affair of party politics. This is a thing of common humanity.
Albert Einstein was asked in one case how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to exist intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you lot want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
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