Reading to Wisdom

How we can bring wisdom, a sense of justice and a large dose of wonder to a child’s life.

The world’s on fire, and our children and young adults have questions. Why do we persist in inflicting wounds on our planet? Why does a handful of billionaires wield such vast political power? Why won’t anyone stop children from dying in ancestral wars? These and other painful, intractable questions.

Now that those same billionaires are lashing out against any restriction placed on their capacity to monetise our children’s time, now that they are attempting to make fact-checking a thing of the past, it’s more urgent than ever to provide children with their own wisdom, a sense of justice, and inexhaustible sources of joy.

Read, read, read…

The best way I know to do this is by having our children read stories.

Frank Cottrell Boyce, the Children’s Laureate, tells of when he spoke to novelist Mariela Mayer about her childhood; she had been forcibly separated from her family, moved to 16 orphanages and three reformatories, and later imprisoned. Boyce asked her, ‘How did you know you deserved more? How did you know life could be better?’ She replied, 

‘I read Heidi.’

However inexplicable life is, reading can be the portal to other worlds, be they filled with fantasy or social realism; books are a place where children can see their own fears, desires, pain and conflicts writ large -  and played out safely.

In a chaotic world, one where children wield no economic or political power and have minimal agency, the best children’s books place the child at the centre of everything. They invite the child on epic journeys, to take perilous risks, to distinguish good from villainy, to slay evildoers, to stand with the underdog, to see a child like themselves experience and overcome difficulty. Quite simply, the most complex of a child’s emotions can be validated and resolved in the cathartic process of reading.

Fantasy does this wonderfully (The Hobbit, the Narnia books, Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, Pullman’s The Northern Lights trilogy, Mary Poppins, The Moomin stories, Pippi Longstocking) but so does a more interior novel (The Railway Children, Little Women, Jacqueline Wilson’s and Judy Blume’s stories).

The best children’s books, and English has a very rich tradition here, also amuse; they treat the child as an intelligent being worthy of ironical asides. It is conspiratorial and confidential; the child feels addressed as an equal.  Roald Dahl’s The Twits, the Winnie the Pooh stories, Toad of Toad Hall, Beatrix Potter all invite the child to laugh at pomposity, greed, unkindness, etc. without tipping into moralising. Simply by amusing, the child sees the wink from a wiser, older, power and feels complicit. 

Additionally, nuanced humour sharpens a child’s linguistic intelligence, as well as their understanding of people.

If it is true that the internet and social media operate largely on an undemanding plane of homogenous values, novels do the reverse: they work the mind hard and expand the imagination by creating mental worlds and a sense of infinite possibilities. 

If all that were not enough, we know that reading is the single most significant indicator of a child’s academic success and therefore success in later life.

So if reading is the key to liberating the mind, to constructing a moral compass, and to building a sense of identity, why are our children increasingly giving up the habit? Because, heartbreakingly, reading is most definitely on the wane. The UK’s National Literacy Trust published in Nov 2024 that only 34.6% of UK children aged 8 to 18 said they enjoyed reading, a historic low since their surveys began in 2005.  

The NLT estimates that nearly one million children in the UK do not have a single book of their own whereas one quarter of all 3-4 year olds in the UK have a smartphone of their own. And, depressingly, UK schools are not required by law to have a library, so many don’t.

In our own international community, many of us do have ready access to books. Yet many of our children are reluctant to pick one up.

What can be done?

We build beautiful libraries; these must be the heart of any school and community, stuffed with stories and non-fiction, and we visit them often with our child. If our child’s school has no library, we visit a municipal library as a family trip, or if we can afford to, bookshops: we build a beloved library at home!

We give children access to great literature - but not all of the time; if they long for graphic novels, abridged novels or popular reads, we don’t sniff at those. They are all stories and will work their magic on a child to some degree.

We offer audio novels for those who still struggle to decode the written word: listening is reading too.

Storytime is precious

We read with our child - the best children’s books are wonderfully wise, full of humour and philosophy that will entrance adults too.  We read to our child in the most delightful, intimate moment of the evening. And we keep this going well into the stage when a child can read for themselves -  until they shut the bedroom door on us and claim reading as their private pleasure.

At that point, we can read in parallel, if the child allows; parent and child / young adult both reading the same novel, separately-  Heidi, Little Women, Harry Potter. And then exchanging ideas, book club-style: why does that character inspire such fear? Why on earth did they make such a foolish move? Who does she remind you of? What would you have done? Talking on an equal footing with the child; everyone’s response to an art form is valid and personal. This kind of talk clarifies a child’s thinking not only about a story but by extension about life itself.

We’ve been telling stories and handing them down since the birth of civilization, since well before the invention of writing. Storytelling is perhaps the oldest art form, encoded in our humanity. We’ve always told stories of rifts and wars, monsters and lovers, friendship and loss, even, according to Plato, of rings that make us invisible. 

This is surely worth preserving for our children; the sense of wonder, wisdom and everyday heroism that stories can impart are the perfect antidote to a world of chaos and very few answers.

Beyond this, children's reading is a bold act of optimism; if we allow this new generation to envision a better world and the courage needed to bring it about, they may effect the changes we're longing to see.

Audrey Reeder, January 2025