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Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator. His latest book is The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading.
Is reading books – like travelling by steam locomotive, hand-churning butter or keeping your opinions to yourself – about to become a thing of the past? Is it an eccentric activity to be pursued, in the end, only by a small minority of hipsters with an antiquarian affectation?
The anxiety was given striking expression in a recent piece in The Atlantic headlined, starkly: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” In it, Rose Horowitch canvassed dire warnings from academics at various Ivy League institutions that their undergraduates were finding the requirement to read a book-length text in a week or two impossible.
It bears noting that the article leans more heavily on anecdote and hearsay than it does on statistics; as Ms. Horowitch admits, “No comprehensive data exist on this trend.” But judging by its reach on social media, that hearsay has chimed with the experience of many educators. It chimes with what I hear from friends teaching the humanities in Britain and I dare say it will chime with the experiences of faculty in Canada’s universities too.
The interesting word in that headline, it seems to me, is “can’t.” “Won’t,” we might have expected. The lazy or disorganized undergraduate, the undergraduate too preoccupied with keg parties and getting laid, is a figure for the ages. But the undergraduate who earnestly, and with the best will in the world, simply doesn’t know how to go about navigating a text of 100,000 words even by the time they are admitted to an institute of higher learning – this seems to be a new one.
We can blame some of this, of course, on the arrival of the digital age. Educational psychologists have described the distinctive mode of reading in the age of the internet as “continuous partial attention.” That is, in contrast to the archetypal deep reading of a single volume in a book-lined study, we hop from text to text, clicking through a forest of open tabs while our pinging phones compete for our attention. We are, in T.S. Eliot’s prescient words, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” Perhaps the defining catchphrase of the internet age is “TL;DR.”
But there’s more than that at work here, too. In The Atlantic’s telling, it’s a pipeline problem. A Columbia professor quoted in the piece said that their first-year undergraduates struggled to read a book cover to cover because they had never been asked to before. At high-school level – and this is as true in Britain as in North America – students are often expected to parse gobbets and chunks rather than a whole book. They are spoon-fed quotes and themes and précis, and asked to examine short passages rather than read the whole of, say, Bleak House or Wuthering Heights or even the bite-sized Heart of Darkness.
Back to that operative word: can’t. The universities blame the high schools: Their students have not learned the skills or – which is closely allied – the habit of sustained reading. Because, no doubt, it’s a habit that needs to be taught. And the sooner you teach it, the more likely it is to take. Which is why, I think, we need to look further up the pipeline than high school.
In writing my latest book The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, I found myself returning to two points in my own life. One was the indelible memory of being read to by my own father: Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my lifelong career as a reader and writer about books started there.
In the age of continuous partial attention, it’s not just that a child attends to a book when you read together: It’s that the child is getting the whole of the adult’s attention too. You can’t read a child a story and check your phone at the same time. Attention to the text is reinforced and deepened by the emotional connection between parent and child. You, the child, are in that moment what Kipling’s daughter Effie was to him: “Best beloved.”
The other memory that seemed to be a data point was more recent. It is of rushing in a panic up the stairs in my home after hearing a heart-piercing wail from my then-preteen daughter. I burst into her room to find her not, as I’d imagined, injured. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, in inconsolable floods of tears, with a copy of Charlotte’s Web in her hand. She’d got to that bit. She couldn’t understand why I was so delighted.
I was delighted because she’d got it. She’d discovered that it’s possible to be deeply moved by words on a page set down by a man who died on the other side of the world years before she was even born. And once that discovery is made – once a young reader realizes that there’s something in a dead-tree book that you can’t get in quite the same form anywhere else – the habit of reading for pleasure and the ability to read with deep attention will be seeded for life.
We know that enthusiastic deep reading can exist even in our era of digital distraction and continuous partial attention. The Harry Potter craze, which broke across the world around the turn of the millennium, was a phenomenon of the digital age rather than the analog one. Children who had access to video games, who were able to browse the internet, nevertheless queued up all over the world at midnight on launch day to obtain a 600-page dead-tree book. That phenomenon was led by pleasure.
John Locke, writing in his 1693 treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education, recognized that “a child will learn three times as much when he is in tune, as he will with double the time and pains when he goes awkwardly or is dragged unwillingly to it.” The skills of immersive concentration acquired when reading for fun can be applied, in due course, to more challenging texts. Trying to persuade children or young adults to read books as a duty, if they’ve never done so for pleasure, will always be an uphill struggle.
“Can” and “will” are closely related, then. There’s no question in my mind that the serious study at the university level of any humanities subject requires the ability and willingness to read and make sense of entire books. That’s a habit that must be cultivated and maintained at high school if students are to carry it into further education with them. But it needs to start much earlier than that. And it starts like this: “In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale …”