'We read to know we are not alone'
Monday, April 28, 2008
LAST week at Jerudong International School Anne Fine, the children's novelist, spoke to over a thousand pupils from six Bruneian schools, as well as to many adults. Her message was clear: reading is one of the most important things we do. Through literature, we find out what it is to be human. Through fiction, we experience all the human emotions there are: love, hate, ambition, jealousy, despair, joy, regret. In books we find out what it is like to be someone else and we escape from our dull, wretched lives.
Quoting the religious writer and Oxford don C S Lewis (1898-1963), Anne Fine said "we read to know we are not alone". "Jack" Lewis was an inspiring teacher and those who have read his Chronicles of Narnia or seen the film Shadowlands will concur. In her talks Anne Fine read extracts from letters to her from her young readers. Some had experienced the trauma of divorce in their own families, but found solace in Madame Doubtfire and Goggle Eyes, perhaps her two most famous books. She said they sometimes imagined themselves into her stories and found their own experiences there.
On Friday at JIS, at ten past one, we all stopped what we were doing, sat down and read a book for forty minutes. We put aside our marking, the homework we needed to hand in, the paper we need to write for that urgent meeting, and we read. A token gesture you might say, but an important one. I found myself picking up Northern Lights, the first novel in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. Fantasy worlds are a great antidote to headmastering — things run more smoothly there.
I have to say I don't often read children's stories — I really can't bear Harry Potter — but this was very different. I liked the duality of all the characters, their "daemons" representing their male and female aspects. I liked the parallel universe, in which Oxford, London and the Fens were still recognisable. I liked the cohesiveness of Lyra's world, the uniting of very different people to defeat a common enemy. I liked the absence of sentimentality.
For forty minutes I was away in the universe of Lord Asriel and quite oblivious to everything around me. Here was a fast moving, rip-roaring tale of plucky adventurers, defeating the monster and returning to live another day. I haven't put it down this weekend, except to write this.
How important it is for young people to be exposed to stories! They have stories all the time of course, on television, in Korean soap operas, on DVDs and at the cinema. But how much better are the pictures, when we create them in our own heads, when the reader generates them at the instigation of words on a page!
I almost always feel cheated when I see the film of the book. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a case in point. I first read this great epic when I was sixteen and I have never totally weaned myself off it. In my head, I still have a picture of an avuncular, but terrifying Gandalf, who is far more imposing than Ian McKellen in the film version. The Frodo in the film just does not look like the Frodo in my mind.
When we read, we engage with the printed words on the page. Reading a book — getting inside the characters and the world being described — is as creative a process as writing the book in the first place. We are not passive observers. We actively respond to the words to create pictures. In a film, on a computer screen, the pictures are given to us. We are given someone else's interpretation of reality. Making the film may be a creative act, watching it isn't, unless it is a very wordy film, in which we are invited to think.
What a privilege to enter the imaginary world of authors! Books, by giving us an insight into someone else's world, allow us to step back from our own. They help us regain a sense of proportion and see our petty troubles for what they are. Paradise, someone once said, is probably a large library. In a library, you can experience things you cannot possibly know in reality, you can visit places you will never visit in a hundred years. (As well as libraries, we need good bookshops too and in Brunei, unfortunately, these are in short supply.)
As teachers and parents, it is our duty to give children the right books at the right time. My English teacher made me read Conrad's Heart of Darkness much too early. That put me off Conrad for years. How can one possibly understand the madness of Kurtz at the tender age of fifteen? What an act of vandalism to expose a teenager to Conrad's vision of the human condition!
...there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing...
We forget that universal literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon and that it is by no means universal; indeed I feel sometimes it is in decline, given the emphasis in modern life on the visual image. Until the twentieth century nearly every human being on the planet was illiterate. Nowadays literacy, even more than numeracy, is an expectation and yet we do little to foster it. If we are going to subsidise rice, perhaps we should subsidise books as well, which are just as essential to mental health as meat, fish and vegetables.
Our cultures are based on stories, some based in fact and some entirely fictional, on great mythical histories, from which proceed our values and our attitudes. In the stories we give to children, there are only a limited number of plots: overcoming the monster; the quest, rags to riches — Christopher Booker's analysis of this in The Seven Basic Plots is enlightening. If children don't acquire a grounding in these basic tales of human experience, they cannot move on to the tragedies and comedies of adult literature, the great tales of death and rebirth. They will not grasp the more fragmented structures of modern literature, because they have no background in the classics.
Learning to read is a long and immensely complex process and it needs to be nurtured at home, at school and in society, if we are to protect our civilisations from barbarism. Some young people are growing up conditioned by the violence of computer games and the shallow certitudes of much modern cinema. They have no exposure to the stories and traditions that underpin our values and way of life. Small wonder then that some take refuge in drugs or alcohol. It is the job of schools and parents to make sure that all our young people are exposed to the magic of creative writing.
The writer is the principal of Jerudong International School.
The Brunei Times
Quoting the religious writer and Oxford don C S Lewis (1898-1963), Anne Fine said "we read to know we are not alone". "Jack" Lewis was an inspiring teacher and those who have read his Chronicles of Narnia or seen the film Shadowlands will concur. In her talks Anne Fine read extracts from letters to her from her young readers. Some had experienced the trauma of divorce in their own families, but found solace in Madame Doubtfire and Goggle Eyes, perhaps her two most famous books. She said they sometimes imagined themselves into her stories and found their own experiences there.
On Friday at JIS, at ten past one, we all stopped what we were doing, sat down and read a book for forty minutes. We put aside our marking, the homework we needed to hand in, the paper we need to write for that urgent meeting, and we read. A token gesture you might say, but an important one. I found myself picking up Northern Lights, the first novel in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. Fantasy worlds are a great antidote to headmastering — things run more smoothly there.
I have to say I don't often read children's stories — I really can't bear Harry Potter — but this was very different. I liked the duality of all the characters, their "daemons" representing their male and female aspects. I liked the parallel universe, in which Oxford, London and the Fens were still recognisable. I liked the cohesiveness of Lyra's world, the uniting of very different people to defeat a common enemy. I liked the absence of sentimentality.
For forty minutes I was away in the universe of Lord Asriel and quite oblivious to everything around me. Here was a fast moving, rip-roaring tale of plucky adventurers, defeating the monster and returning to live another day. I haven't put it down this weekend, except to write this.
How important it is for young people to be exposed to stories! They have stories all the time of course, on television, in Korean soap operas, on DVDs and at the cinema. But how much better are the pictures, when we create them in our own heads, when the reader generates them at the instigation of words on a page!
I almost always feel cheated when I see the film of the book. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a case in point. I first read this great epic when I was sixteen and I have never totally weaned myself off it. In my head, I still have a picture of an avuncular, but terrifying Gandalf, who is far more imposing than Ian McKellen in the film version. The Frodo in the film just does not look like the Frodo in my mind.
When we read, we engage with the printed words on the page. Reading a book — getting inside the characters and the world being described — is as creative a process as writing the book in the first place. We are not passive observers. We actively respond to the words to create pictures. In a film, on a computer screen, the pictures are given to us. We are given someone else's interpretation of reality. Making the film may be a creative act, watching it isn't, unless it is a very wordy film, in which we are invited to think.
What a privilege to enter the imaginary world of authors! Books, by giving us an insight into someone else's world, allow us to step back from our own. They help us regain a sense of proportion and see our petty troubles for what they are. Paradise, someone once said, is probably a large library. In a library, you can experience things you cannot possibly know in reality, you can visit places you will never visit in a hundred years. (As well as libraries, we need good bookshops too and in Brunei, unfortunately, these are in short supply.)
As teachers and parents, it is our duty to give children the right books at the right time. My English teacher made me read Conrad's Heart of Darkness much too early. That put me off Conrad for years. How can one possibly understand the madness of Kurtz at the tender age of fifteen? What an act of vandalism to expose a teenager to Conrad's vision of the human condition!
...there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing...
We forget that universal literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon and that it is by no means universal; indeed I feel sometimes it is in decline, given the emphasis in modern life on the visual image. Until the twentieth century nearly every human being on the planet was illiterate. Nowadays literacy, even more than numeracy, is an expectation and yet we do little to foster it. If we are going to subsidise rice, perhaps we should subsidise books as well, which are just as essential to mental health as meat, fish and vegetables.
Our cultures are based on stories, some based in fact and some entirely fictional, on great mythical histories, from which proceed our values and our attitudes. In the stories we give to children, there are only a limited number of plots: overcoming the monster; the quest, rags to riches — Christopher Booker's analysis of this in The Seven Basic Plots is enlightening. If children don't acquire a grounding in these basic tales of human experience, they cannot move on to the tragedies and comedies of adult literature, the great tales of death and rebirth. They will not grasp the more fragmented structures of modern literature, because they have no background in the classics.
Learning to read is a long and immensely complex process and it needs to be nurtured at home, at school and in society, if we are to protect our civilisations from barbarism. Some young people are growing up conditioned by the violence of computer games and the shallow certitudes of much modern cinema. They have no exposure to the stories and traditions that underpin our values and way of life. Small wonder then that some take refuge in drugs or alcohol. It is the job of schools and parents to make sure that all our young people are exposed to the magic of creative writing.
The writer is the principal of Jerudong International School.
The Brunei Times
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