Reading under8ted…

CHRIS BENNETT muses on words.

A READER asked me what I meant in a recent column by “hat-tip to Dylan”. When one is obliged to credit a colleague or another writer, without getting too serious and academic, it is customary to say a hat-tip, from the old custom of tipping one’s hat in acknowledgement.

In this case I was referring to the twentieth century Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. I had paraphrased this opening stanza:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

It is particularly poignant for those of more mature years; as Oscar Wilde said, “Youth is wasted on the young”.

Notwithstanding the turmoil on the shores of the ancient Mediterranean Sea, the crucible of our learning, young people and the culture of reading have been in the international spotlight again recently.

A study by the National Literacy Trust in England has revealed much about the sad business of getting children to read. It follows the publication of a major international league table last year that showed reading standards among children in Britain had slipped from 17th to 25th in the world.

The study has shown that one in six children are failing to read books, largely because they spend an increasing amount of time texting friends (what we call sms, a very clunky name), sending emails and searching Facebook and Twitter. The very names of the last two give me a twitch.

I admit to using Facebook, but often wonder why. I suppose that I enjoy reading what other people are up to, and, in any case, I spend a lot of time on my computer, researching and reading and Facebook takes very little of that time.

But back to the books.

The British survey also found that reading frequency declined sharply with age, with 14- to 16-year-olds being more than 10 times as likely to shun books altogether as those in primary education.

The British Secretary for Education, the erudite Michael Gove, commented that pupils should read 50 books a year, completing the equivalent of about a novel a week; the academic demands placed on English schoolchildren, he said, had been “too low for too long”.

I was rather taken aback to learn that modern teenagers, approaching whatever matric is called today read one or two books for the exams. One or two?

I seem to remember having to choose a Shakespeare (Hank Cinq), a Dickens (Great Expectations), the works of a poet (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Windhover and God’s Grandeur) and a string of others, most of which I have forgotten. It was instilled into the mewling litter of boys in my class that nothing was more important than reading, and to me it remains a fundamental truth to this day, did we but know it.

Although I concur with the idea that the standard of education in this country, at certain institutions, is possibly higher than that in Britain, I am alarmed by the lack of language skills in the young black people I know here on the South Coast.

There are, of course, quite a few admirable exceptions, one of whom works for the Herald and is both a gifted speaker and writer, but the bulk of our young people seem to have had little chance to understand why language, especially English, is so critically important.

They will find out all too soon, I fear.

CB

26/8/11