Yes, it’s bad with literature, but you should try music. Anything beyond a one-idea song comprising a few notes is “too difficult”. Yet when you give children of every age complex, melodic and beautifully harmonised music their eyes sparkle and if they are young enough they will get up and dance.
Please let’s give our children complex and beautiful ideas, forms and structures to play with. Otherwise we churn out mediocre adults, who think they know everything but cannot even think clearly, let alone originally.
Grace, I agree. I have taught music my entire life - pianist, choral, music literacy, by trade. My eldest daughter is a professional cellist and has shared with me that the examination process (Canada) has been dumbing down the exams to accommodate more students faster - or something like that. I have seen it recently when coming upon my Scottish granny's old music theory books. The basic level is beyond possibility with today's beginning theory students. Or, perhaps I am out of the loop yet my daughter confirms my assumption.
I think you apologize too much for your thesis, or at least anticipate too much criticism "the accusation of stuffy traditionalism." I think it's time to speak boldly about what we know in our hearts is true and that we learned from experience. Our current system is drastically underestimating - and shortchangng our children. Let children be gourmands. Give them access to copious books at all levels. Assume they are up to the challenge and bring them the classics. A child gets something even from a book that is over his head.
This intellectual reductionism is the same as some parents not letting their 14 year olds cross major streets on their own when children as young as five used to walk to the shops. It's like a sudden collective and violent memory loss of what children are capable of.
And I object to your statement that 11 year olds cannot read about dismemberment and cannibalism! Why not? I read the complete abridged works of Shakespeare the summer I was 10. I may not have fully understood everything or got all of the language, but I enjoyed it. Grimm's Fairy Tales contain many dark episodes including dismemberment and cannibalism.
When I was seven and eight years old my father and I read out loud together Great Expectations, Alice in Wonderland, Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stephenson and many others. After that I tended to read on my own, and in the summer when I had the gift of boredom - that thing we never allow our children to feel anymore - I read just about every book on my father's bookshelves, save physics textbooks and investment guides. I read The Double Helix, The Voyage of HMS Beagle, various Dickens novels, E.B. White, old copies of Smithsonian magazine, etc. Later I did the same with my Mom's books, plus all the usual children's books - Oz, Narnia, Ursula Lequin, Madeleine L'Engle, Harriet the Spy, Peanuts, Paddington, Little House on the Prairie, and all sorts of random old children's books like Lad: A Dog from my school's library.
I don't know where this is going to end, but I do know all these books are still there waiting for our children to discover them.
"The gift of boredom." I feel sorry for children who never learn to appreciate this gift. Today, parents have to rack their brains for ways to entertain their children during the summer holidays, whereas we embraced "the gift of boredom" with nothing but our own imagination. For example, we wrote screenplays and „filmed“ them without cameras or props.
As a ten year old I remember the rage I felt when my father removed my light bulb to prevent me from reading late into the night.
I was allowed to choose 3 books a month from the local library and loved reading ‘Call of the Wild’ and various other books that weren’t on the school curriculum.
Reading immerses us in a different world and introduces us to unfamiliar environments and people and allows us to roam around these places at will.
Seeing how people behave/react to situations and reading dialogue helps us gain understanding that everyone sees things from their own perspective.
Sadly, teaching today is geared to not upsetting kids who struggle. If they see their classmates get ahead, it’s supposed to hurt their feelings and self esteem, so we keep everyone held back to avoid this.
It’s systematic dumbing down and teaches kids not to strive.
It also exhausts teachers who have to ‘scaffold’ the less capable kids instead of spending time motivating the better abled.
There are better ways to support struggling children than to dumb down their classmates.
Making everyone bland and incurious is the result of the spread of ‘equity of outcome.’
Andrew, excellent reading as ever, I believe that is precisely what those in power are aiming for. Mediocrity is the order of the day. Mediocre people are so much easier to manage, they don’t think critically and therefore ask fewer questions. The era of the Clockwork Orange is finally successfully and openly here! Stanley Kubrick will be revolving in his grave!
It’s not that new. As a ten year old I suffered a severely broken arm and spent ten weeks in Du Cane Road hospital in London. I was missing a lot of school so they sent a teacher in to ensure I was reading and to keep my brain working, or so I thought, I was bored and eager. I was reading , Lord of the Rings and I was loving it, I was busy drinking it all in and like many my first read was a bit ‘shallow’ (I got bored of the songs and poems so skipped them etc ) anyway, this woman came in Monday to Friday and insisted that I desist from reading Tolkien, I had to read her book instead, fair enough but her book was Paddington Bear.. I honestly couldn’t believe it. I had been an avid reader from an early age, but my Janet and John ladybird puffin days were far behind me. I was far beyond (or so I thought at the time, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (how wrong I was with that one) no, I had to read Paddington out loud to her, for an hour a day, or else..
I offered to read L.O.T.Rings out loud, no it wasn’t happening she was a lost cause and right there and then I realised that there were many people, in positions of power that were simply simple, little yes men robots, totally unable to think for themselves.
The goal I fear is to create little nodding Chinese Mushrooms prancing round and round to Tchaikovsky’s Tea dance. Britain’s education system the envy of the world, it might have been once! The NWOrder is sorting that out is it not? This is all part of the picture Andrew. Ve vill stick to ze basics und you Vill have zero ambition und if you do develop it, you vont know zee vord to use to describe your distress! Vee vill create fewer leaders und thinkers.. ve vant vorkers zee epsilons .. zee New Vorld Order ob zee day! Here, take zee pill from zee state GP!
„I was told that I could not teach Dickens to my Year 7 class (age 11-12) because they would struggle to comprehend the language and the deeper themes.” - in Poland „A Christmas Carol” is obligatory lecture for 7th grade
Here’s a couple of suggestions: before the kids can read for themselves read carefully chosen books to the kids. The very hungry caterpillar introduces profound themes of transformation (you can’t tell by looking that a butterfly was once a caterpillar) and the conservation of energy principle alongside the drab-but-useful disguised rote-learning.
For 6-9 year old’s the Opie’s “Classic Fairy Tales” is a must. Richly illustrated the Tales provides historical context to about 20 stories – many well-known – but these stories include surprising details that “got lost-along-the-way” (Jack the giant-killer sought revenge because the giant killed Jack’s father). And the endings are not always happy.
When the kids start to read themselves JKR’s Harry Potter books are good because as the stories progress so does required reading skills: the later books have longer sentences, more polysyllabic words and more nuanced ideas, so supply in sequence by following the stories.
Kids aren’t the only ones suffering with bad books, though they’re the ones who need relief most urgently. Most of the books they get are either moralizing political tracts or thinly disguised therapy (he felt this, she felt that).
No wonder they resort to anime or k-pop or other cheap fare. They’re looking for stories. Older books still provide that, but the vocabulary’s slightly different, and they aren’t developing the muscles to push past that til they can let the plot take hold of them. Getting read to would certainly help.
I published one YA novel. In the process, a senior editor told me she can’t sell a book unless she can reduce the premise to a phrase. Not a sentence: a phrase.
And Julius Ceasar used to be required reading in high school. My mother once told me how much they all loved "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war."
I read Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories as an adult but am certain I would have loved it as a child - such a beautifully written book and wonderfully touching story
Excellent piece, but it understates the problem. We’re not just in a pedagogical slump — we’re sleepwalking into an intellectual emergency.
Soon, the ability to handle ambiguity, grasp subtext, or think through complexity won’t be developed — it’ll be outsourced. Why wrestle with irony when your AI can summarise it in emoji?
Children won’t need better books. They’ll need a reason to read at all. AI doesn’t just threaten jobs — it threatens the quiet extinction of mental effort.
And while educators and policymakers fret over Union Jack dresses and pronouns, the real crisis rolls on, unnoticed.
Hear hear. We decided to home educate our kids because the school system is so lacking in every way. They've studied several Shakespeare plays, usually in the run-up to going to see a production of that play (Oddsocks do fantastic outdoor tours each summer). When they were little, we read them classics like The Hobbit, not just picture books. My 13-year-old is just embarking on his first read of Jurassic Park. He has loved the films and dinosaurs more generally all his life, and he decided he wanted to read the original novel. Not many kids his age these days embark on such weighty tomes. I was reading Shakespeare by the time I was 11 or so and unlike my peers, was thrilled when it came to studying his plays in English lessons. But I was an odd pre-teen and teen, preferring Edgar Allen Poe and Little Women to Goosebumps, or teen magazines. Kids deserve better than what our current school system provides. Unfortunately, Labour is also on a mission to remove our freedom to opt out of that system. Thankfully, my kids are nearly at the end of their home ed journeys, but I fear for families with younger kids who may not have the same options we did.
My husband, who is now 82, was brought up in the poorest circumstances but read Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson et al which he remembers with joy to this day! He has still got his Buffalo Bill Annuals, which contain a great deal of reading. He is disabled and in a care home but these things have always meant a great deal to him. He left school at 14 and worked as a Lighterman on The Thames, another great joy. Great literature knows no bounds!
Academia has ruined the study of Shakespeare in school. It was bad enough when I was at school 55 years ago and it's only got worse I suspect.
Having watched some excellent amateur performances of Shakespeare at Tolethorpe Theatre near Stamford I've come to the conclusion that Shakespeare's plays were the soaps of their day. They covered historical and recent events (some with a heavy spin!) and examined relationships etc etc.
"We should trust pupils to understand that the best experiences of reading are to be discovered when we are tested and pushed in unexpected directions"
Isn't this a double edged sword when activists push children in "unexpected directions" reading crap like "Am I a boy or am I a girl".
Perhaps you already see the problem with polish lectures: lots of national martyrology and teaching children from young age about fighting for Homeland in need and dying for your country
Fascinating article, Andrew, and some terrific comments from your readers. I'm at an age now where if I learn a new fact my brain seems to have to lose an old one just to make room. To dumb down kids' education when their brains are fresh and sponge-like seems criminal to me. Even if children don't necessarily understand Shakespeare's music, just the sound, shape, colours and cadences of this beautiful language will sparkle if sung correctly.
From anecdotal stories I've heard from school teachers it seems like schools are on track to replicate conditions from Kurt Vonnegut's short story "The Handicapper General." Not because teachers no longer wish to teach, rather potentially well-intentioned admins are enforcing top-down buerectatic demands for equal outcomes, parental appeasement, and social coddling that restricts teachers from challenging their students in any meaningful way.
Yes, it’s bad with literature, but you should try music. Anything beyond a one-idea song comprising a few notes is “too difficult”. Yet when you give children of every age complex, melodic and beautifully harmonised music their eyes sparkle and if they are young enough they will get up and dance.
Please let’s give our children complex and beautiful ideas, forms and structures to play with. Otherwise we churn out mediocre adults, who think they know everything but cannot even think clearly, let alone originally.
Grace, I agree. I have taught music my entire life - pianist, choral, music literacy, by trade. My eldest daughter is a professional cellist and has shared with me that the examination process (Canada) has been dumbing down the exams to accommodate more students faster - or something like that. I have seen it recently when coming upon my Scottish granny's old music theory books. The basic level is beyond possibility with today's beginning theory students. Or, perhaps I am out of the loop yet my daughter confirms my assumption.
I think you apologize too much for your thesis, or at least anticipate too much criticism "the accusation of stuffy traditionalism." I think it's time to speak boldly about what we know in our hearts is true and that we learned from experience. Our current system is drastically underestimating - and shortchangng our children. Let children be gourmands. Give them access to copious books at all levels. Assume they are up to the challenge and bring them the classics. A child gets something even from a book that is over his head.
This intellectual reductionism is the same as some parents not letting their 14 year olds cross major streets on their own when children as young as five used to walk to the shops. It's like a sudden collective and violent memory loss of what children are capable of.
And I object to your statement that 11 year olds cannot read about dismemberment and cannibalism! Why not? I read the complete abridged works of Shakespeare the summer I was 10. I may not have fully understood everything or got all of the language, but I enjoyed it. Grimm's Fairy Tales contain many dark episodes including dismemberment and cannibalism.
When I was seven and eight years old my father and I read out loud together Great Expectations, Alice in Wonderland, Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stephenson and many others. After that I tended to read on my own, and in the summer when I had the gift of boredom - that thing we never allow our children to feel anymore - I read just about every book on my father's bookshelves, save physics textbooks and investment guides. I read The Double Helix, The Voyage of HMS Beagle, various Dickens novels, E.B. White, old copies of Smithsonian magazine, etc. Later I did the same with my Mom's books, plus all the usual children's books - Oz, Narnia, Ursula Lequin, Madeleine L'Engle, Harriet the Spy, Peanuts, Paddington, Little House on the Prairie, and all sorts of random old children's books like Lad: A Dog from my school's library.
I don't know where this is going to end, but I do know all these books are still there waiting for our children to discover them.
"The gift of boredom." I feel sorry for children who never learn to appreciate this gift. Today, parents have to rack their brains for ways to entertain their children during the summer holidays, whereas we embraced "the gift of boredom" with nothing but our own imagination. For example, we wrote screenplays and „filmed“ them without cameras or props.
Haha, I don't think I ever wrote a screenplay. I wrote little "plays" for me and my friends, though
As a ten year old I remember the rage I felt when my father removed my light bulb to prevent me from reading late into the night.
I was allowed to choose 3 books a month from the local library and loved reading ‘Call of the Wild’ and various other books that weren’t on the school curriculum.
Reading immerses us in a different world and introduces us to unfamiliar environments and people and allows us to roam around these places at will.
Seeing how people behave/react to situations and reading dialogue helps us gain understanding that everyone sees things from their own perspective.
Sadly, teaching today is geared to not upsetting kids who struggle. If they see their classmates get ahead, it’s supposed to hurt their feelings and self esteem, so we keep everyone held back to avoid this.
It’s systematic dumbing down and teaches kids not to strive.
It also exhausts teachers who have to ‘scaffold’ the less capable kids instead of spending time motivating the better abled.
There are better ways to support struggling children than to dumb down their classmates.
Making everyone bland and incurious is the result of the spread of ‘equity of outcome.’
we constrict their intellectual development.
Andrew, excellent reading as ever, I believe that is precisely what those in power are aiming for. Mediocrity is the order of the day. Mediocre people are so much easier to manage, they don’t think critically and therefore ask fewer questions. The era of the Clockwork Orange is finally successfully and openly here! Stanley Kubrick will be revolving in his grave!
It’s not that new. As a ten year old I suffered a severely broken arm and spent ten weeks in Du Cane Road hospital in London. I was missing a lot of school so they sent a teacher in to ensure I was reading and to keep my brain working, or so I thought, I was bored and eager. I was reading , Lord of the Rings and I was loving it, I was busy drinking it all in and like many my first read was a bit ‘shallow’ (I got bored of the songs and poems so skipped them etc ) anyway, this woman came in Monday to Friday and insisted that I desist from reading Tolkien, I had to read her book instead, fair enough but her book was Paddington Bear.. I honestly couldn’t believe it. I had been an avid reader from an early age, but my Janet and John ladybird puffin days were far behind me. I was far beyond (or so I thought at the time, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (how wrong I was with that one) no, I had to read Paddington out loud to her, for an hour a day, or else..
I offered to read L.O.T.Rings out loud, no it wasn’t happening she was a lost cause and right there and then I realised that there were many people, in positions of power that were simply simple, little yes men robots, totally unable to think for themselves.
The goal I fear is to create little nodding Chinese Mushrooms prancing round and round to Tchaikovsky’s Tea dance. Britain’s education system the envy of the world, it might have been once! The NWOrder is sorting that out is it not? This is all part of the picture Andrew. Ve vill stick to ze basics und you Vill have zero ambition und if you do develop it, you vont know zee vord to use to describe your distress! Vee vill create fewer leaders und thinkers.. ve vant vorkers zee epsilons .. zee New Vorld Order ob zee day! Here, take zee pill from zee state GP!
„I was told that I could not teach Dickens to my Year 7 class (age 11-12) because they would struggle to comprehend the language and the deeper themes.” - in Poland „A Christmas Carol” is obligatory lecture for 7th grade
Is it?
Yup, I bring source https://www.listalektur.pl/lista-lektur-dla-klas-7-8-szkoly-podstawowej/
Here’s a couple of suggestions: before the kids can read for themselves read carefully chosen books to the kids. The very hungry caterpillar introduces profound themes of transformation (you can’t tell by looking that a butterfly was once a caterpillar) and the conservation of energy principle alongside the drab-but-useful disguised rote-learning.
For 6-9 year old’s the Opie’s “Classic Fairy Tales” is a must. Richly illustrated the Tales provides historical context to about 20 stories – many well-known – but these stories include surprising details that “got lost-along-the-way” (Jack the giant-killer sought revenge because the giant killed Jack’s father). And the endings are not always happy.
When the kids start to read themselves JKR’s Harry Potter books are good because as the stories progress so does required reading skills: the later books have longer sentences, more polysyllabic words and more nuanced ideas, so supply in sequence by following the stories.
I so, so, so agree.
Kids aren’t the only ones suffering with bad books, though they’re the ones who need relief most urgently. Most of the books they get are either moralizing political tracts or thinly disguised therapy (he felt this, she felt that).
No wonder they resort to anime or k-pop or other cheap fare. They’re looking for stories. Older books still provide that, but the vocabulary’s slightly different, and they aren’t developing the muscles to push past that til they can let the plot take hold of them. Getting read to would certainly help.
I published one YA novel. In the process, a senior editor told me she can’t sell a book unless she can reduce the premise to a phrase. Not a sentence: a phrase.
And Julius Ceasar used to be required reading in high school. My mother once told me how much they all loved "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war."
Andrew, please keep up the good work!
I read Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories as an adult but am certain I would have loved it as a child - such a beautifully written book and wonderfully touching story
Excellent piece, but it understates the problem. We’re not just in a pedagogical slump — we’re sleepwalking into an intellectual emergency.
Soon, the ability to handle ambiguity, grasp subtext, or think through complexity won’t be developed — it’ll be outsourced. Why wrestle with irony when your AI can summarise it in emoji?
Children won’t need better books. They’ll need a reason to read at all. AI doesn’t just threaten jobs — it threatens the quiet extinction of mental effort.
And while educators and policymakers fret over Union Jack dresses and pronouns, the real crisis rolls on, unnoticed.
Hear hear. We decided to home educate our kids because the school system is so lacking in every way. They've studied several Shakespeare plays, usually in the run-up to going to see a production of that play (Oddsocks do fantastic outdoor tours each summer). When they were little, we read them classics like The Hobbit, not just picture books. My 13-year-old is just embarking on his first read of Jurassic Park. He has loved the films and dinosaurs more generally all his life, and he decided he wanted to read the original novel. Not many kids his age these days embark on such weighty tomes. I was reading Shakespeare by the time I was 11 or so and unlike my peers, was thrilled when it came to studying his plays in English lessons. But I was an odd pre-teen and teen, preferring Edgar Allen Poe and Little Women to Goosebumps, or teen magazines. Kids deserve better than what our current school system provides. Unfortunately, Labour is also on a mission to remove our freedom to opt out of that system. Thankfully, my kids are nearly at the end of their home ed journeys, but I fear for families with younger kids who may not have the same options we did.
My husband, who is now 82, was brought up in the poorest circumstances but read Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson et al which he remembers with joy to this day! He has still got his Buffalo Bill Annuals, which contain a great deal of reading. He is disabled and in a care home but these things have always meant a great deal to him. He left school at 14 and worked as a Lighterman on The Thames, another great joy. Great literature knows no bounds!
Academia has ruined the study of Shakespeare in school. It was bad enough when I was at school 55 years ago and it's only got worse I suspect.
Having watched some excellent amateur performances of Shakespeare at Tolethorpe Theatre near Stamford I've come to the conclusion that Shakespeare's plays were the soaps of their day. They covered historical and recent events (some with a heavy spin!) and examined relationships etc etc.
"We should trust pupils to understand that the best experiences of reading are to be discovered when we are tested and pushed in unexpected directions"
Isn't this a double edged sword when activists push children in "unexpected directions" reading crap like "Am I a boy or am I a girl".
„ because stories involving dismemberment and cannibalism are hardly age-appropriate.” - well in Poland kids in classes 6-8 (teacher’s choice) read Sienkiewicz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knights_of_the_Cross
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paul_Street_Boys is for 5th graders
And this is for 8th grade https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stones_for_the_Rampart it’s non-fiction novel about resistance to nazi occupation and youth dying in military operations.
Perhaps you already see the problem with polish lectures: lots of national martyrology and teaching children from young age about fighting for Homeland in need and dying for your country
Fascinating article, Andrew, and some terrific comments from your readers. I'm at an age now where if I learn a new fact my brain seems to have to lose an old one just to make room. To dumb down kids' education when their brains are fresh and sponge-like seems criminal to me. Even if children don't necessarily understand Shakespeare's music, just the sound, shape, colours and cadences of this beautiful language will sparkle if sung correctly.
From anecdotal stories I've heard from school teachers it seems like schools are on track to replicate conditions from Kurt Vonnegut's short story "The Handicapper General." Not because teachers no longer wish to teach, rather potentially well-intentioned admins are enforcing top-down buerectatic demands for equal outcomes, parental appeasement, and social coddling that restricts teachers from challenging their students in any meaningful way.