Learning to read

I was slow at learning to read. I was almost the slowest in the class. The teacher used to tell me how far behind the others I was. At one time, my parents were afraid I would never learn at all. We had a book about Dick and Dora and Nip the dog to learn from. My mother realised I just wasn't interested in these dull characters who never did anything remotely interesting. She got me the Lion comic which had stories like Paddy Payne -Spitfire Pilot, and Sky-High Bannion, who was a kind of globe-trotting aviator. She read me the comic two weeks in a row, and on the third week, when I asked her to read it to me, she told me to read it myself. That is how I learned to read. I wonder how many other people have failed to learn to read for similar reasons, and not got the help I got from my mother? To a five-year-old the merit of reading is not obvious.

            It has become fashionable to blame the failure to learn to read on dyslexia, a rare disorder of the nervous system. This is in most cases incorrect. Most failure to grasp reading has emotional reasons, such as dislike for the teacher.

            I recently read a report that said that a majority of teenage children are afraid to be seen with a book by their friends, in case they laugh at them. How has this deplorable state of affairs come about? Some kind of moral failure by adults would seem to be involved. We have failed to communicate the importance of books to the younger generation. In this society, people who don't read books will probably be stuck at the bottom of the economic heap, and those who don't read at all almost certainly will. Do the teenagers know this? If not, why not? Some people are going about saying that reading will be less important in the future because of computers. The opposite is, of course, the case. It is hard to imagine an illiterate person mastering a computer. The World Wide Web is unlikely to interest the illiterate. How would they know what to click on?

            More and more young children are growing up in dysfunctional families, due to the growth in drug abuse and crime. I recently heard a young man talking in the street with a friend. He said things had been going quite well for him, and he had been accepted at the university, but had had a set-back, as he had 'Had to go jail for a couple of munfs.' Does he even know it's not spelt with an 'f'? Unless something radical is done, more and more class stratification will take place, and a barbaric future lies ahead of us. Too many of the better educated people believe that ignorance is an innate and unalterable aspect of the lower orders, that they are uniformly beyond any kind of uplift. While this is certainly true for some, there must be many trapped in the underclass by bad luck, something which previous generations seemed to know, yet which is in danger of being forgotten.