Reading can be for solitary pleasure or it can be a quotidian task. Some people avoid books in favour of other forms of recreation; others read everywhere from bathrooms to Tube carriages. Some people love reading so much they even study English till the very end of school.
In fact a decade ago English was the most popular subject at A-level. It was also one of the most popular university degrees. This year it was the 12th most popular A-level course, lagging behind other subjects like maths and geography, physics and history. And the number of students who took English at university has fallen by a third in the past decade. The status of English is in steep decline in the British education system; schoolchildren and university undergraduates are falling out of love with it.
My reason for choosing English at A-level a decade ago, and subsequently studying it at university, was not because it was popular. It was because I loved it and recognised literature as one of the art forms in which Britain most excels. William Shakespeare in drama. John Donne in poetry. Jane Austen in fiction. The canon is full of geniuses.
Many other people would rather study a subject other than English for a variety of reasons; something that leads to a particular job like medicine, or something they are simply more interested in such as history. All of this is perfectly fine. English should not have a monopoly on our education system.
Yet I fear the decline in the popularity of English in schools and universities is part of a more depressing trend. It is one thing to accept that English is not as popular as it used to be at A-level and in universities, but the wider problem of poor literacy among young children is something that needs to be swiftly tackled.
According to a new study by the National Literacy Trust, for instance, one in 12 children — nearly a million children in Britain — do not own a book of their own at home.
Children from a working-class background are especially affected; children on free school meals are twice as likely to report not possessing any books as children from more affluent backgrounds, and this gap is at its largest in a decade.
London also has an advantage when it comes to literacy. Children in our capital are more likely to own books than children in the rest of the country; the North-West is the region with the lowest rate of children who own books. One fifth of public libraries in Britain, moreover, have closed in the past
10 years, and in the most disadvantaged communities in the country one in four schools don’t have a library or designated reading space.
Why does this matter? It matters because this gap in literacy compounds other forms of inequality. People who lack good literacy skills are more likely to be unemployed or in low-paid jobs. They are more likely to be clinically depressed and obese. And they are more likely to die younger.
Not everyone needs to study English at university or A-level, and nor do they need to gain as much pleasure in fiction or poetry as people like me. But those who are not equipped with the capacity to read well when they are children will struggle for the rest of their lives. This is why increasing the literacy rates of the most disadvantaged children in our society should be of utmost priority.
The great collaborator
Thelma Schoonmaker is one the greatest living film editors. Her long-term collaboration with Martin Scorsese has yielded a collection of wonderful films, including Scorsese’s latest, The Killers of the Flower Moon, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio.
But in recent months I have also been reminded, in light of the BFI retrospective on Powell and Pressburger, of the relationship between Schoonmaker and the great English film director Michael Powell: she was his wife and companion in the 1980s.
They met through Scorsese. Powell had at that time been living in obscurity for 20 years after his 1960 film Peeping Tom scandalised critics. Scorsese revitalised Powell’s films in the 1970s and Schoonmaker revitalised Powell’s life in the 1980s.
In a BBC Radio 4 documentary called Thelma & Michael: Love in the Cutting Room, Schoonmaker said: “He knew how to love. I’ve never known someone who knew how to love like Michael did. He taught me so much about that.”
