Nickie Muir: Reading shapes young minds

Nickie Muir.

Right now you are doing something that you were not born to do and do not have any specific genes for which you might inherit some help for doing it - reading. That's right.

Reading is an unnatural habit. It's a habit that is learnt and a habit that is mind altering.

Every book should contain an advisory warning on the cover which says: the material within these covers could seriously affect your brain, possibly for the rest of your life.

Our brain cells and the way they are wired together, physically change after every reading.

Each book leaves an imprint on our psyches and grows us in unpredictable and enriching ways.

What we read is to a great extent, who we become.

Reading is a complex activity and it's no surprise that every single totalitarian government decides that the books and those who peddle them must go. Reading is a subversive activity and giving kids a bibliography could be construed as lighting a path through the forest of life or just setting fire to it.

It's a ridiculously big ask to suggest a canon of literature and think that you've covered all bases.

It'd be impossible at any rate - at least if you study something like classics - the canon is closed and nothing new is added. You can become a master over a limited, if eminently relevant domain. The world of modern literature however is an ever-expanding universe where even the classics can become either an ancient black hole of irrelevant cultural matter or, like some of Shakespeare's work, a miraculous microscope on modern life.

There is significant research to suggest that it's not who our parents are or what they do for a living or what our mothers' educations were or what decile school we go to, it's the number and quality of books that the young (women especially) are reading that has the biggest positive impact on their life outcomes.

There is also a real lack of evidence to suggest that all the digital technology in the world is actually helping with literacy or learning outcomes anywhere.

John Hattie, a well respected teacher educator and researcher, ranks digital technologies, ie computer assisted learning and web-based learning, as numbers 77 and 124 respectively on the list of influences that positively affect student achievement.

That's hardly a ringing endorsement and yet there is a battle to get kids (my own included) to hit the books when YouTube is constantly calling them in to play.

It is often difficult to find the quiet and the space and the faith to allow kids to be bored enough to make books the interesting option. The jury is out on how digital technology forms our thinking.

Research tells us that it's old-school reading that has allowed us to create the civil societies that have allowed us to develop as a species.