Dear parents
The place of reading in a modern future-focused education is often debated, often with a wringing of hands over the modern generation’s propensity to consume information in ever-decreasing bitesize chunks. As we have just come to the end of the Foundation ‘reading week’, it is timely to consider what reading means for the post-Twitter generation.
And Twitter is a good place to start. When we took the Year 7 students away on their residential trip to Lee Valley, this seemed (for at least some parents) to be a good way for them to be given updates about the activities that their children were doing. Good for sharing photos then, but how has Twitter, and social media, changed the way our students read? We may live in the world of the sound-bite, but behind the 140 characters there are often links to more in-depth articles and blogs that offer valuable insights into the world in which we live. It is true that these are unedited and lacking quality control, but this enables students to develop skills of discernment and a critical eye that we never had growing up in an age of one newspaper and 3 TV channels.
How many ways did our students embrace reading during the last week? I’m sure a great number read a fiction paperback for pleasure (and this is undeniably good!) but did they also consume via newspapers, blogs, audiobooks, and the like? Reading can give us space and time away from screens and the modern world, but the new ways that we can now read also give us access to material and viewpoints that we could not have imagined 20 years ago. In a multimedia world, I am convinced that the process of reading is more important than ever, but we should be cognisant that there are ever more ways of accessing this. Rather than viewing this as a problem, I believe we should see the opportunity for us to help our young people to develop the skills of critical analysis necessary to consume media in the digital age.
With half term on its way, the hope is that this week will give some momentum that will ride into the holiday and our students will become engrossed in their current book. There will also be the opportunity to read whilst travelling on one of the school trips that are going out at what is arguably the busiest time of year for our expeditions team. We hope that the trips to Berlin, Beijing and Italy are all successes and our students develop culturally both once they are in country, but also en route.
We look forward after half term to continuing to encourage reading at all levels and are happy to be able to announce that, in the second half of term, we have an author visit from comedian Ben Miller who will be giving an Inspire and Guide talk to our students outlining his journey from completing a PhD in physics to becoming a household name in entertainment. Many of our students enjoy both comedy and physics, so I hope this is a talk they will gain much from.
Warm wishes for a restful half-term,
David Walker, Head of Senior School
