Where to Write Note Where Nobody Can Read Them
I t's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you lot near reading. I'grand going to tell you that libraries are important. I'k going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is 1 of the nigh important things one can do. I'thousand going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.
And I am biased, manifestly and enormously: I'g an writer, ofttimes an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For nearly thirty years I have been earning my living through my words, generally by making things upwards and writing them downwards. Information technology is apparently in my involvement for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and assistance foster a dearest of reading and places in which reading can occur.
So I'm biased as a writer. Just I am much, much more than biased as a reader. And I am even more biased equally a British citizen.
And I'1000 here giving this talk this night, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to requite anybody an equal risk in life by helping people get confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the human action of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.
And it'southward that change, and that human activity of reading that I'm here to talk virtually tonight. I want to talk nigh what reading does. What it's good for.
I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk near the edifice of individual prisons – a huge growth manufacture in America. The prison industry needs to plan its futurity growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from at present? And they found they could predict information technology very easily, using a pretty elementary algorithm, based on request what percentage of 10 and xi-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.
It's non one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.
And I retrieve some of those correlations, the simplest, come up from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.
Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it'south a gateway drug to reading. The bulldoze to know what happens next, to want to plough the page, the need to go along going, even if information technology's hard, considering someone'southward in trouble and yous have to know how it's all going to cease … that'south a very existent drive. And information technology forces yous to acquire new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you larn that, yous're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. At that place were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we 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 important than they ever were: we navigate the globe with words, and every bit the globe slips onto the web, nosotros demand to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what nosotros are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot commutation ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only get and then far.
The simplest fashion to brand sure that we enhance literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.
I don't recollect in that location is such a thing as a bad volume for children. Every now and over again it becomes fashionable among some adults to indicate at a subset of children's books, a genre, mayhap, or an author, 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 declared a bad writer, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics accept been decried every bit fostering illiteracy.
It'south tosh. Information technology's snobbery and it's foolishness. At that place are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, considering every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the commencement fourth dimension the kid has encountered it. Practice not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do non like is a route to other books you lot may adopt. And not everyone has the aforementioned gustation equally you lot.
Well-meaning adults can hands destroy a child's dear of reading: stop them reading what they savour, or requite them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll air current upwardly with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
We demand our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading volition move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Besides, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to become and get a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you liked those you'll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the remainder of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's proper name is mentioned.)
And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When yous spotter TV or see a motion-picture show, you lot 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 you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You go to experience things, visit places and worlds you lot would never otherwise know. You acquire that everyone else out in that location is a me, equally well. You're being someone else, and when you render to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function every bit more than self-obsessed individuals.
You're besides finding out something as you read vitally of import for making your way in the world. And it'due south this:
The world doesn't have to exist like this. Things can be different.
I was in China in 2007, at the commencement party-approved scientific discipline fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one betoken I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not introduce and they did not invent. They did not imagine. And then they sent a delegation to the United states of america, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they plant that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
Fiction can show you a dissimilar earth. It can have yous somewhere you've never been. Once y'all've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the globe that you grew up in. Discontent is a good affair: discontented people tin can modify and improve their worlds, get out them better, leave them different.
And while nosotros're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words almost escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad matter. 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 lot ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight exterior, gives y'all a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are existent places, brand no mistake near that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can likewise give you knowledge well-nigh the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can accept dorsum into your prison house. Skills and noesis and tools you tin can use to escape for real.
As JRR Tolkien reminded usa, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Another way to destroy a kid'south love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of whatever kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an first-class local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their mode to piece of work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morn and working his fashion through the card 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'due south' library I began on the adult books.
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books beingness read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to similar that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me well-nigh the books I was reading, they would observe me other books in a series, they would assist. They treated me as another reader – cipher less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to existence treated with respect as an eight-twelvemonth-old.
But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of advice. They are well-nigh education (which is not a procedure that finishes the mean solar day nosotros leave school or university), about entertainment, almost making condom spaces, and almost access to information.
I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If yous perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem blowsy or outdated in a earth in which most, only not all, books in print be digitally. Merely that is to miss the point fundamentally.
I think information technology has to practice with nature of information. Information has value, and the correct information has enormous value. For all of human being history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and ever worth something: when to constitute crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were e'er good for a repast and company. Data was a valuable thing, and those who had information technology or could obtain it could accuse for that service.
In the terminal few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economic system to 1 driven past an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the homo race creates as much information equally nosotros did from the dawn of culture until 2003. That'south nigh five exobytes of data a day, for those of y'all keeping score. The claiming becomes, non finding that scarce constitute growing in the desert, but finding a specific constitute growing in a jungle. Nosotros are going to demand assist navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.
Libraries are places that people go to for data. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries tin can provide y'all freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever earlier – books of all kinds: paper and digital and sound. Simply libraries are besides, for instance, places that people, who may non have computers, who may not have internet connections, tin can go online without paying annihilation: hugely important when the mode you find out most jobs, apply for jobs or utilize for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.
I exercise not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: equally Douglas Adams one time pointed out to me, more twenty years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is similar a shark. Sharks are erstwhile: there were sharks in the bounding main before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are ameliorate at being sharks than annihilation else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your paw: they are good at being books, and in that location will always be a place for them. They vest in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can get to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental wellness data. It's a customs space. It'due south a place of prophylactic, a haven from the world. It'south a identify with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be similar is something nosotros should be imagining now.
Literacy is more of import than ever it was, in this globe of text and electronic mail, a world of written information. We demand to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, cover what they are reading, empathise nuance, and make themselves understood.
Libraries really are the gates to the hereafter. Then information technology is unfortunate that, circular the world, we observe local government seizing the opportunity to shut libraries as an easy way to relieve money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.
Co-ordinate to a recent study past the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the "just country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account".
Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to sympathise it to solve problems. They tin be more than easily lied to and misled, will exist less able to modify the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England volition fall behind other adult nations because it volition lack a skilled workforce.
Books are the fashion that we communicate with the dead. The manner that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with united states, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than nearly countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were beginning told.
I call up we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the globe they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – every bit readers, equally writers, every bit citizens – have obligations. I thought I'd try and spell out some of these obligations hither.
I believe nosotros have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If nosotros read for pleasance, if others see the states reading, and then we learn, nosotros exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a expert affair.
We take an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to apply libraries, to protestation the closure of libraries. If you practise not value libraries then you do not value information or civilization or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you lot are dissentious the futurity.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they savor. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to go far interesting, and non to stop reading to them but considering they learn 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 use the linguistic communication. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should utilize it as a living affair, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.
We writers – and peculiarly writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who practice not exist in places that never were – to empathize 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 accept an obligation non to bore our readers, merely to make them demand to plow the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and laissez passer on whatever wisdom we take gleaned from our short stay on this green globe, nosotros accept an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like developed 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 not want to read ourselves.
We take an obligation to understand and to admit that as writers for children we are doing important piece of work, because if we mess it upwards and write tedious books that turn children away from reading and from books, we 've lessened our own hereafter and macerated theirs.
We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. Nosotros have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change annihilation, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the private is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. Only the truth is, individuals change their earth over and over, individuals brand the future, and they do it past imagining that things can be different.
Look around you lot: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and wait around the room that you are in. I'g going to betoken out something so obvious that information technology tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can come across, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided information technology was easier to sit on a chair than on the basis and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you lot in London right at present without the states 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 beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, non to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We accept an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not get out our children with a world nosotros've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and bedridden.
We accept an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not empathize the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do non want to human action to preserve and protect cognition and encourage literacy. This is non a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.
Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If yous want your children to exist intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to exist more intelligent, read them more than fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I promise 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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