Sarah Evans: Writing is on Facebook wall

Feb 26 2010 By Sarah Evans

Adults have always worried about children’s reading habits.

As literacy spread through the country in the 19th century, middle class women took up their pens to produce morally uplifting children’s books to counter the sensationalist horrors of the ‘penny dreadfuls’. The dubious influences of gender and race stereotypes in Enid Blyton and even the Ladybird books led to them being, if not burnt, at least banned in libraries and liberal homes across the country. Comics and tweeny magazines have had teachers tearing their hair for decades.

So the current disapproving headlines about children’s reading matter are not a new phenomenon. Less than half of children aged nine to 14 read fiction more than once a month, according tothe National Literacy Trust – 42 per cent of boys and 48 per cent of girls. Websites, emails, blogs and social networking sites are the leisure reading of choice for children.

To some extent schools collude in this. There has been a massive investment in IT in schools and its use across the curriculum is seen as a key skill for both students and teachers. In inspection terms, good schools will be IT heavy. A school in East London claims to get students a C at GCSE English Language largely by using social media websites – and it only takes a month.

Opinion is divided. Phillip Pullman, author of the Northern Lights trilogy, described the move in libraries away from books to computers as a ‘byword for philistinism and ignorance’.

A University of London research project shows that three-year-olds who are read stories every day have better reading skills later on – and one assumes that is stories as in books not the fictions of social networking sites. Other research suggests that young people’s use of the web encourages them to skip from one information source to another, and they don’t acquire the ability to concentrate for any length of time.

We are heading, pessimists think, for a world where literacy is the ability to read only a few sentences and wisdom will be lost.

But perhaps like earlier worries, this one will not lead to a complete meltdown. Those three-year olds who are being read to every day are acquiring a habit that won’t necessarily be broken when they discover the delights of Facebook. There should be room for both.

* Sarah Evans, principal, King Edward VI High School for Girls