[ Current issue ] [ Back issues ] [ Special Issues ]

Editor's Letter - March 2008

In January, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, launched the National Year of Reading 2008. From next month, employers, schools, libraries, colleges and local authorities will be holding events and taking part in activities to encourage children, families and adult learners to help build a ‘national passion for reading’.

The aims of the year, to create ‘a lasting legacy in attitude, activity and participation’ and ‘put in place the building blocks for systematic change’, are, perhaps unavoidably, vague, but it will have been a valuable exercise if by the end of it many more people are engaged in reading than would have been otherwise. As Ed Balls commented at the launch, reading opens doors. What’s exciting about reading is that we often have no idea what’s on the other side.

A quick survey of current reading matter among NIACE colleagues reveals a remarkably diverse list of literary preoccupations, from Dawkins to Dickens. Some read to satisfy a particular interest or concern, others because of a more general interest in being taken to another place, in just getting lost.

As Carol Taylor points out, it’s difficult to see where reading fits with the Government’s overwhelming concern with skills and employability, and its enthusiasm for accreditation and progression, but the initiative is welcome nonetheless, not least in reminding us of the value of creativity and of our need to find spaces in which to ‘get lost’.

There are, of course, many projects and activities already out there which demonstrate very well the difference reading can make in people’s lives. John Denham’s informal learning consultation paper notes, among other indicators of his ‘quiet revolution’, the rise of the book group. And then there are other, more formal and ambitious, initiatives, often struggling for funding outside the educational mainstream. Jane Davis’s Get into Reading project is one of the most notable. Jane’s initiative, conceived originally as a project ‘without outcomes’, aims to introduce serious literature to people who don’t think of themselves as readers and wouldn’t consider joining a reading group or literature class. Get into Reading groups meet weekly to hear a reading from the chosen text (usually something pretty challenging) and to discuss it. The participants use their own experience to interrogate the text and, in turn, use the text to make sense of their own thoughts and feelings.

In a typical week, Jane and her team will work with recovering drug abusers, elderly people in day centres, young homeless men, full-time carers, isolated young mums, and people with mental health or other chronic illnesses referred to the project by health professionals. Although some of the group members have problems with literacy the aim of the project is to teach not reading but ‘being with books’. As the project has developed – there are now more than 50 reading groups and the work is no longer thought of as entirely ‘without outcomes’ – Jane has become more ambitious. She would like to see the scheme adopted throughout the country, as a tool of regeneration. The regeneration agenda, she believes, is ‘all about creativity’. To regenerate a community you need not only economically useful skills but confident, imaginative people who ‘believe they can do things’.

Reading is one way of opening up a creative dimension to people’s lives. At the very least, it makes people aware that there is more than one way of looking at things – no small thing in times when so much that needs to be criticised and contested appears to go by on the nod.

As Quick Reads author Gilda O’Neill says, ‘those amazing little black marks on paper’ give us access to other worlds. They are also the means by which we can share our own worlds with others. The National Year of Reading, ‘a celebration of words in every form’, is an opportunity to reassert the value of both reading and storytelling, not only in the classroom but also in our workplaces and communities. We hope readers will get involved.

Paul Stanistreet Editor, Adults Learning