At the tail end of the summer holiday, my son and I had a shouting match in King’s Cross station. For more than three hours on the train south from Durham, he’d been staring at a single question on a comprehension paper. The text began with a description of a road running through the moonlit countryside, and question three asked: ‘Why does the author compare the road to a grey silk ribbon?’
Between Durham and Peterborough, I had repeated that question, with increasingly psychopathic calm. ‘So darling, why does the author compare the road to a ribbon?’
You can’t measure a child’s enjoyment of a book but you sure can measure their fronted adverbials
By the time the Arsenal stadium came into sight, I could feel small things inside my brain starting to come loose and on platform 1I lost my cool. ‘Just give me an answer, anything! Tell me it’s a metaphor, at least.’
‘I can’t think when you’re shouting at me.’
‘You’ve been thinking for hours.’
‘Mum, it’s a stupid question.’
The air was thick with city dust. The cat mewed pitifully in its travel box and the fight went out of me because my son was right. It was a stupid question. But there had been so many stupid questions. For the last few weeks of the holidays he’d been preparing for 11-plus exams and my frustration, I realised, was not with him but with the system and schooling of all sorts.
There’s no real reading of whole, actual books in class, did you know that? I understood this properly for the first time over the summer. It’s not the fault of any school, state or independent. It’s simply that the curriculum requires only the endless analysis of excerpts. Sometimes it’s a few paragraphs from a decent book or poem, but never with any sense of the longer story it’s cut from. Extract after extract, great factory lines of them, one after the other, like chicken pieces waiting to be processed. Find the similes, synonyms, sibilance. Skin ’em, slice ’em, dice ’em.
‘I hate comprehension,’ said my son, who last summer was lit up with love of White Fang.
Back in 2023, before it was the subject du jour, a novelist called Katherine Marsh wrote a piece for the Atlantic: ‘Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love with Reading’. Already people had begun to realise what a catastrophic effect smartphones have on attention spans, but it wasn’t just the screens, said Marsh, it was the teaching: the work pupils were expected to do in class.
The emphasis on assessments had, in Marsh’s view, put pressure on teachers to teach only to the test. You can’t measure a child’s enjoyment of a book or the depth of their feeling about it, but you sure can measure their fronted adverbials. So out went the notion of inspiring children with a love of story and in came the endless parsing of passages, with the result that even kids who loved reading as small children now often think of it as a chore.
Three years after Marsh’s piece, the latest Pisa scores, released a fortnight ago, prove her point. The great reading recession has only deepened and though the UK has fared better than most other western countries (thanks largely to the editor of this magazine), even here, fewer and fewer kids are reading at length, or for pleasure. And in place of the recreational reader, the Pisa people identified a new sort of reader, the ‘hasty reader’ .
A ‘hasty reader’ is a student who skims speedily through the text, but demonstrates a lack of real understanding by making errors in more complicated questions. They’re reading, Jim, but not as we know it: not with sustained engagement but just superficially, because this is the way we’ve taught them. Modal verbs, adjectival noun phrases, can you find a subordinating conjunction? How does the author create an atmosphere of suspense? (Three marks.)
If you teach children that the value of any text is in the points you can extract from it, why would you expect them to read for fun?
What we are seeing, says an academic called Carl Hendrick, is a generation of kids who are not less cognitively capable but rather who have been raised in a culture of skills-based reading which implicitly told them that what you read is less important than how you read it.
And perhaps ‘hasty reading’ isn’t the worst of it either. I have a teacher friend who tells me she has bright students who seem incapable of understanding the sense of what they’ve read. They can say the words out loud, even scan for a simile, but when she asks them to retell the story or to anticipate what might come next, they’re at a loss. They can’t inhabit the sentences; they’re not making pictures in their minds as the story unfolds. Not hasty readers, but zombie readers. Perhaps as smaller children they knew how to sink into a story, but the extract factory has put paid to that. Now all they can do is stare at the surface of a text, hoping for a fronted adverbial to bob by.
And what if it doesn’t end? That was what was really behind my shameful yelling at the station. I’m pushing my only child through the factory because I assume that at some point, in whatever school he goes to next, the extracts will end. I want for him what I once found when I landed up, through luck and some sort of expelled-schoolgirl prisoner-exchange programme, at Wycombe Abbey, where the teachers were brimming with a love of literature. But is it antonyms now, all the way down?
The irony of the process is that by far the best way of understanding an excerpt and answering the interminable questions is to have read it in context. Yesterday, my son came across a passage in a comprehension paper taken from The Wind in the Willows, and, because he knows and loves the book, every question about author’s intention suddenly made perfect sense to him.
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