How to get our kids to read books

The writer is the author of the Jack Reacher novels

Growing up in postwar Birmingham meant there was very little to do. My parents took the view that anything enjoyable was best avoided. But they gave me two precious gifts. The first was a constant supply of books — a basic staple in our house, usually sourced at a jumble sale and provided without question. The second was ready access to a public library, in Birmingham at first. But when I exhausted its shelves we commuted to the next municipality and the mind-stretching bounty of a multistorey library. You could find pretty much any book you wanted. It was paradise.

Books made me, so I think a lot about their place in the world. Do young readers have the same opportunities to dive into an infinite world of stories? Do books give them the confidence to imagine their own futures? Does the wider culture respect books and readers?

I’m troubled by the answers. Never an early technology adopter — I still have the yellow pencil I used to write my first novel — I’m deeply concerned about the impact of mobile devices and digital media on our attention spans and reading habits. In America, where I lived for many years, school librarians are under siege, facing intense pressure to remove books that campaigners judge “inappropriate” from the shelves. In the UK, the National Literacy Trust reports that just one in three young people say they enjoy reading in their spare time — the lowest level in two decades. English literature is in decline as a subject choice at A-level and at university.

The reasons are no doubt complex and numerous. I want to focus on one: the books our children study at school. As a teenager in the 1960s, I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on. Inside the classroom, we studied a narrower canon: Shakespeare, the great poets and Victorian novels by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot.

All these authors are of course worthy of study, now as then. But you might expect the English literature curriculum to look somewhat different for the students of the 2020s. It must surely reflect and embrace the sweeping cultural change we’ve lived through: access to education, social attitudes, immigration, diversity of our population and so much more.

Yet if you look at the English curriculum our young people study today, it remains stubbornly similar to the 1960s. The overwhelming majority of authors still look a lot like me (though they don’t write like me, you might be relieved to learn). While access to brilliant, imaginative authors like Malorie Blackman, Meera Syal and Bernardine Evaristo is now possible for GCSE and A-level classes, schools lack the support to actually get these texts into the hands of their students.

There’s nothing new in making the case for change. The national curriculum has failed to meet the needs of a “diverse multicultural and multi-ethnic society”, argued the landmark 1999 Macpherson report after the murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence. A quarter of a century later, fewer than one in 50 GCSE students studies a writer of colour. More than one in three such students identifies as Black, Asian or from an ethnic minority background.

My publisher, Penguin Random House, is among those calling for a more representative curriculum. The Lit in Colour campaign has shown that studying texts by writers of colour can increase students’ empathy, engagement in the subject and enjoyment of reading. These benefits apply to all students — not just those of colour. The classics will and should always have a vital role in the curriculum but teaching a more diverse range of texts can ensure all students feel included and visible. New literature is a portal to unfamiliar worlds and people. It makes sense to sample the lives of our fellow citizens and deepen our understanding of those around us.

Last year’s government-commissioned review of England’s school curriculum says it should “include stronger representation of the diversity that makes up our modern society, allowing more children to see themselves in the curriculum”.

Rightly, it puts special emphasis on English, saying “the curriculum must also allow space for teachers to exercise autonomy in selecting from a broader range of texts and authors, so that students are able to see themselves in the curriculum, as well as be exposed to a wide range of perspectives to broaden their horizons”.

This is not just about equity and belonging, vital as they are. Change is long overdue. Without it, we risk something even starker than the further decline of a subject: losing generations of young readers and the curiosity, empathy and creativity that reading can inspire. Books have always shaped us; it’s time the books in our classrooms reflect all of us.

Letter in response:
National curriculum should be reserved for the classics / From Alexander Schlatter, New York, NY, US