No. 140 DECEMBER 2025
Raising Books
The Editor, Lucia Quinault( CoRo, 99-) speaks from the heart:
Reading is in the news again. A recent article in the TES calls literacy the‘ magic bullet’, without which no aspect of education can flourish; so much seems obvious.
Katherine Rundell, the author, goes further. In a piece she wrote for The Times in October, she claims that reading for pleasure is a‘ silver bullet for ordinary, everyday childhood happiness’. And the editor of the paper, launching a campaign to‘ Get Britain Reading’, doesn’ t hesitate to describe our national state as a reading‘ crisis’.
The school has recently put in place a number of policies- locking all phones away at night, forbidding Jun Men the use of their Surfaces during toytime- designed to encourage a return to pen and paper, and the printed page, but it can feel futile when increasing numbers of pupils say, on returning to school after a holiday, that they have read nothing.
It’ s easy, of course, for those of us already addicted( the Headmaster has in these very pages confessed her passion for the Master and Commander series of Patrick O’ Brian) to throw up our hands in pious horror, but as an English don, this situation means that every day we talk to an ever higher number of people for whom the central pleasure and intellectual stimulant of our lives is meaningless.
At Winchester, the crisis seems to come in V Book. Jun Men are still happily reading Agatha Christie; MP discover Orwell; but of the nineteen boys in my GCSE set, only a handful read anything at all over the generous two weeks of Leave-Out.
This may be partly our fault: too many boys said that they spent their time working – by which they mean, on their exam subjects – and that proportion will only get higher as the year accelerates towards its end. They conceded that their houses were full of books, ready and available, though one boy wittily said that like Gatsby’ s library( we’ re currently reading Fitzgerald), the books were real, but the pages were metaphorically uncut.
It used to be notional( hammered home in relatively recent times by Rob Wyke( CoRo, 85-15; HoDo, I, 90-01; Second Master, 01-14)) that no school work should be set during a holiday, rather on the old Oxbridge model – that the vacation is for reading, the term for writing – but dons and pupils, anxious about the coming tests, have undermined this admirable principle. Admirable, that is, if we are serious about persuading children back to books.
But how are we to do it? Dominic Rowland( C, 01-06; CoRo, 16-) articulated one of the endless debates the other day: is it better to let your children read books you perceive to be worthless than to see them stop reading altogether? The jury is( probably eternally) out, but I lean towards the habit-forming theory. After all, at least a book – any book – is longer than a video clip. The increasing capacity of phones to amuse and distract is undeniable, but I’ m doubly disqualified to discuss this in any detail, so we’ ll take it as a given.
Rather, I should like to be able to track what happens to the joy that leaves seventeen-year-olds still able to recite The Gruffalo, or admitting that they go back to Robert Muchamore’ s Cherub series for sheer pleasure. Where can we find the books to suit their growing minds the way these books spoke to their childhoods?
My parents didn’ t approve of what we now call‘ Young Adult’ books. I had to read them sneakily, at friends’ houses, or round the back of the bookshelves in the library, out of sight. The result of this ban, however, was that I moved straight from children’ s books – Susan Cooper, Rosemary Sutcliff, Geoffrey Trease – to the classics of the nineteenth century,
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