Not taking it as read
[Reproduced with kind permission of The House Magazine, 5 May 2008. The House Magazine is the unique publication for Westminster and all those with an interest in politics, policy and Parliament. www.housemag.co.uk]

Former children’s laureate Michael Morpurgo tells Baroness Massey about writing, childhood and why it’ll take more than David Beckham to get British children reading in greater numbers.

Michael Morpurgo is in full flow. His grilled Dover sole waits patiently on the plate in front of him as the novelist finishes his point.

“The great evil giant that we’re fighting when we come to children is the whole business of materialism and commercialism. It’s unquestionably one of the reasons why so many children find reading so difficult and don’t take to it, because there’s that immediacy of the commercial and materialistic world. It’s on offer to them and it shouts at them from the television screens all the time, whereas a story takes a degree of quiet and concentration for you to get in the mood for it.

“So in that sense storytelling, particularly if it’s not done well, runs against the grain of that kind of immediate stimulus. The key is to engage a child deeply, which is what these other things don’t do.”

Storytelling is something that Morpurgo does very well indeed. For some time now, he has been one of the nation’s best-loved authors, and a major figure in children’s literature. He has now written over 100 novels, the best known of which are probably Private Peaceful and War Horse. The quality, success and influence of his work was recognised when he became children’s laureate in 2003, a post he held for three years.

In many ways Michael Morpurgo is what you’d expect a fine children’s novelist to be: erudite, softly spoken, and extremely engaging. With his soft features and love of a good anecdote, Morpurgo has the air of a benevolent uncle about him.

Essentially, Morpurgo’s life has been spent engaging deeply with the minds and lives of children and he has very firm views about education and society and the effect they have on the young. Earlier this year he wrote a six-chapter history of childhood over the past 1000 years for Radio 4. The series led him to look more deeply at the welfare and lifestyles of modern children.

One of his chief concerns in this area is that children now get pushed too quickly into adolescence. “What we are doing at the moment is thrusting children forward too much. Society does this anyway. Government and parents are joining in because they are frit if the children aren’t getting on fast enough, if they are somehow not arriving at a place before the competitor. So young children are looking over their shoulders and, further, teachers are looking over their shoulders, at the results the children are getting.

“So you have this tension building up, and I think it’s this tension that cripples education. The schools should be given room to breathe; the children should be given room to breathe.”

Part of the answer, Morpurgo believes, would be to follow the educational model used in parts of Scandinavia, where children don’t start school until the age of seven. He thinks children should have longer before they are subject to “the formality of a curriculum”. Morpurgo says: “It shouldn’t be about trying to coral them, and it’s certainly not about trying to test them, before they are really formed.”

Morpurgo says the whole accent of learning – particularly learning to read – should be changed, with less of an obsession with outcomes and a greater emphasis on enjoyment. His argument is simple: instead of being taught that reading is a necessary tool, children should learn to read as a means of gaining access to fun.

“I understand the anxiety of schools and indeed ministers,” Morpurgo adds, “because what they have is a society which is still profoundly illiterate – there are just far too many people who simply don’t read. They can read enough to read a tabloid newspaper, but they can’t read enough to get under the skin of things.”

In conversation Morpurgo is, as one would expect, a keen storyteller. His arguments and opinions are frequently supported by tales and anecdotes from his own life. To illustrate his point about the misplaced priorities of British society vis-à-vis reading, Morpurgo tells of a reception held at Downing Street recently to launch the National Year of Reading – an initiative he “approves of enormously”.

“There was an interesting discussion between the prime minister and the great and good in the world of education and reading. The prime minister talked for five minutes about the importance of reading – a very good talk – and his commitment to expanding reading, which I believe. But then, having finished his talk, the first person the prime minister turned to for a view on this, was a celebrity. Here I was in the heart of power in this country and someone was turning to a television celebrity for a first opinion on something as important as this!”

Morpurgo has little time for the theory that harnessing the power of celebrity will help convince British children to put down their Playstations and pick up paperbacks.

“It’s absolute twaddle. Time and time again they get David Beckham to say, “yeah, books are great”; they get John Terry to say “yeah, books are great”. Children are not stupid! They know David Beckham is a footballer and he’s brilliant at football. But if he says books are good it doesn’t mean they’re going to start being readers.

“This is what children and teachers are being seduced into. They’re being seduced into this world where money and fame are the big things. And if books do anything, they cut through that – they see people as people, and they enable children to see themselves as being worthwhile and interesting.”

I put it to Morpurgo that we as a society often have quite a strange and contradictory approach to children, in that when we think of children we tend to oscillate between sentimentality and fear. He agrees.

“It damages children profoundly because in the first place it patronises them, and then when they get older and more difficult we get scared.” The result is division and alienation, with “many children feeling that they don’t belong”. It is, he says, “the business of self-worth that we have to tackle”.

“I think there’s quite a good analogy between our society and a family. If we have a family that is fractured, people get to feel left to one side. They get to feel unloved, and then very anxious about themselves because they think so much is their fault and they are the ones in the wrong. It has similarities in that these young people have been divorced by society very early on, cut off, as if they have no place and just don’t belong to that particular family any more.”

As a reader and fan of Morpurgo’s work, the reason I think his books are so effective is because he avoids these two traps. Morpurgo never patronises children or underestimates them. He trusts his young readership with big subjects. Private Peaceful and War Horse are both about the First World War. One of his novellas focuses on a Palestinian child who lives in the shadow of the Israeli-erected security wall. Indeed, one of the reasons Morpurgo thinks literature is so important in the lives of children is that reading is a means of “learning empathy”.

“Books give us a terrific understanding of other people’s lives,” he says, “and they do it in a way which is subtle and which isn’t patronising to our intelligence. And that is critical in this world now, which is changing so fast and young minds are battered and assailed by the materialism and the culture that’s out there that’s coming at them all the time.”

In my own view, boys in particular are affected by the sort of devaluation of literature that Morpurgo speaks of. It’s very important that we find ways of tackling the cultural trends that seem to deter boys from reading.

Partly to that end, as our interview, and lunch, come to a close, Morpurgo raises what seems to me to be a very good idea indeed: a city academy for literature. He wants to see literature given the same importance as technology and sport in the British educational set up. He wants to see British children give a sense of pride and ownership over their literary heritage.

“You need someone to say to the British as a people, ‘your literature is who you are’. Shakespeare isn’t an accident. We have this fantastic history going way, way back. We should rejoice in it. It’s part of who we are.”