Can Technology Rescue Reading? (Your Radical Questions with James Marriott)

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30to bbc.com and the BBC app. Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited.

0:38Amol Rajan:Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions. This is where I put your questions to one of our magnificent radical guests. It's a chance to engage very directly with them and basically ask them about their ideas for the future and about their ideas about what's going wrong today. And if you heard last Thursday's episode, you will have heard the very distinguished writer, columnist, reader, James Marriott, who has chronicled the astonishing decline in reading in many modern societies. I think he goes so far as to call it a collapse. And he thinks we are entering a post-literate age with profound implications for our culture, our democracy and our future.

1:13Amol Rajan:His BBC Radio 4 series, How Reading Made Us, asks whether learning to read rewired our brains and changed the way we live today. He's got a new book out in June. It's called The New Dark Ages. But I promise if you haven't heard last Thursday's episode, it does end on a note of optimism. So almost optimistic. Almost, as close as I can get to optimism. As close as you, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. We've been inundated with questions. I say that every week, but it's always true because you've got a lot of fans and we've got a bunch of questions. Are you feeling radical and ready? Yeah, as radical and ready as I'll ever be.

1:46Amol Rajan:Fantastic. This is the first one and it's from Oliver. Hi, it's Oliver Pritchard from County Durham here. When printing technology first evolved, it was adopted and used for all kinds of ends. it changed the world it was the new technology of its day the new communication tools of today are equally disruptive and with even greater traction can we shape and use them to promote critical thought if so how thanks oliver thank you very much indeed we like critical thought on this podcast how do we use technology to actually shape and encourage the better angels of our nature both emotionally and intellectually james what can we do i mean i know people who heard last Thursday's episode will know that you've got a dumb phone.

2:28Amol Rajan:You're not a dumb guy. How can you use technology to actually encourage people to do more reading, not less? It's a really good question. I mean, I guess part of the answer is things like dumb phones. Part of the answer is that technology, and especially these new communications technologies, don't necessarily have to be designed to constantly distract us and keep us glued to our screens forever. There's no particular reason other than the particular business model of Silicon Valley right now that means that every single new technology means that we spend less time in the real world. I think it's not inconceivable to imagine that perhaps there'll be enough market demand to get things like dumb phones getting a bit more popularity.

3:06I think there are more dumb phones out there and there are more options and that's a bit of a market force. There are all kinds of other things. I mean, when I had a smartphone, I went through endless apps to stop me checking my phone. There's a thing I think, is it called the brick that people use that kind of shuts your it's like a physical device in the real world that shuts your phone down it means you can't check it so there are things that mean you stop checking your phones i mean you're you kind of hear from my answer that basically i think the way to use technology to encourage critical thought is to use technology to spend less time on your phone i guess the counterpoint to me and this is a kind of you know this is at least i think something worth bearing in mind is that like the early days of print in the early days after the printing press did look like total chaos in Europe.

3:46And there's an argument that perhaps we need to find a way to build institutions to handle this like great deluge of information. And perhaps we do need to legislate for social media companies to spread reliable news. And maybe eventually there will be like a cultural demand for reliable information that we'll be able to channel into legislation in the same way that there are all kinds of rules that govern how newspapers report on the world, because once upon a time, newspapers weren't always reporting totally reliably on the world. And perhaps like like a legislative handle on social media in the same way.

4:18Amol Rajan:Can I suggest two quick notes of optimism and sort of positive responses, I think, Oliver? One is gamifying learning. I know it sounds a bit weird because in the end, I think I'm quite old-fashioned and I think you can just learn as a teacher. You can, as a teacher, operate with just, you know, chalk and blackboard and, you know, if you've got pen and paper or pencil and paper, I think that's kind of all you need. I've got quite old-fashioned ideas, maybe radical ideas on that front. But if you gamify learning, so I've got four kids, the oldest is nine, there are certain apps where you can make learning the basic if you like the fundamentals of for instance arithmetic really really fun so there's an app for instance where you can incentivize people to get lots of points by being really good at mental arithmetic teachers will know and parents will know what i'm talking about when i mention tt rockstars which is times table rockstars other apps are available and you basically need to learn your 12 times table and you learn really really quickly and you kind of the quicker you can do it the more you can get right the more you know that you know six times eight is 48 the more you know that whatever 12 times 6 is 72 you can get i hope those two things are right i could do more of these because i'm good at arithmetic um 27 squared 729 um you can get to more and more points by being good at arithmetic and that i think there's a role for that stuff a gamification of learning as a kind of base it's way of getting your toolkit kind of sharpened if you like but one other thing which i'm very personally interested in because um of the age my kids are at because my obsession with artificial intelligence, and particularly its value for social mobility, is the idea of AI tutors.

5:46Amol Rajan:And I've heard so much about this, and I've not yet really seen it. And obviously, it's a huge growth market. But the idea that you could, possibly through a kind of embodied voice or a kind of persona, but that you could have a kind of intelligence, which kind of cultivates your learning, for instance, even just phonics and basic literacy, I think that's potentially quite useful. And if you think about the potential advantage of AI in education, reducing the load on teachers, you know, what is the value of that education? What is the value of that sort of intelligence? I'm quite excited about the idea that you could have a kind of healthy, time limited access to screens for AI tuition at an early age to help lay the foundations of the three R's, for instance.

6:31Amol Rajan:Oliver, thank you so much for this. This is another question from Kirstie. Hello, this is Kirsty McAlpine from Borderline Books, a charity based in the North East. We redistribute unwanted books from publishers, bookshops, authors and agents, as well as the general public, and we give them to people with no access to books for one reason or another, both in our local community and in prisons. Our question, reading for pleasure is one of the most powerful ways to develop empathy and understanding of human experiences. Do we risk changing our sense of what it means and feels like to be human when we lose this connection to an imaginary world.

7:06Amol Rajan:Oof, Kirsty, what a fantastic question. And it's very nice to hear from the people of Borderline Books, which is in Gateshead. Thank you for all the heroic work that you do, particularly getting books into prisons, which I think is about the most noble thing you can do. James, do we risk changing our sense of what it means and feels like to be human when we lose this connection to an imaginary world? Yeah, I totally think so. There's a great argument that's made by Stephen Pinker in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that the spread of novel reading spread empathy through society and was an important factor in this historical development he calls the humanitarian revolution.

7:41As people read more books and they read more books and novels about people who are very different to themselves and they got used to putting themselves inside the minds of, for instance, slaves or servant girls, this precipitated a load of important social changes, the abolition of slavery, decline of torture, prison reforms, that he thinks were directly connected to the fact that society in general was just getting more used to putting its mind inside other minds. People just had a kind of broader sense of what it was to be human and were better able to think about and understand the humanity of other people, which is something that books do really well because they put you inside other minds and they make you think about what it's like to be somebody else.

8:20The danger of social media is that, to me, social media and smartphones can do the opposite. That's all about reinforcement. Yeah, reinforcement. What I think, making you feel different to other people. and I do think this again coming back to our conversation I guess it's last week now about how one of the fundamental things of liberal democracy you know reading is fundamental to liberal democracy it's because it helps us understand what it's like to be other people and if you're going to exist in a community you have to have a theory of mind and you have to have a way of thinking about what it's like to be someone who's not yourself I think social media tribalizes us and it does kind of the opposite thing I also would just in particular response

8:56Amol Rajan:to you, Kirsty, would say that reading expands the boundaries of the possible in a way that other media forms don't. So for instance, if you imagine Mario, a Mario kind of universe game, Mario Kart, for instance, that's a different world, but someone else has imagined it for you. And actually, what's really interesting about science fiction is if you look at from Elon Musk to many of history's greatest engineers and scientists, they were profoundly inspired by science fiction because science fiction is never really about the future it's about today it's a kind of temperature test it's a kind of it's a taking of the temperature for how we feel today about tomorrow and there's a very very good argument that the incredible science fiction that kind of flowered in the mid 20th century was really an expression of optimism about what we could achieve in the future and i worry a little bit that if science fiction diminishes then that sense of optimism will go as well and it's not the same thing when you've got a game when you've got a computer game or you're on tiktok or even if you're in a imaginary world which is being created by ai that's a kind of that visual representation is doing the work for you whereas when you're in your own head thinking about narnia it's cool in a way that no game can quite capture that's my um that's my humble submission kirstie thank you very much indeed for your question i think the next one we've got is a oh this is nicole who's been in touch with me on instagram nicole thank Thank you very much indeed.

10:16Amol Rajan:Nicole says, is there anything we can learn from other countries on this topic? I seem to recall reading that Spain had much higher rates of reading and that it was growing, not declining. Can this be true, James? Do you know if it's true that Spain is doing better? I don't know. I mean, are there other countries that you've surveyed where you think people are getting things right? Are people doing anything that you've seen in the making of how reading made us, which is your Radio 4 series or indeed in your new book that makes you think, okay, that's what we should do more of? I think these trends are pretty widespread.

10:46I think they, from my best understanding, they're quite spread across, you know, all cultures that have iPhones this is happening in. I think my understanding is that often, as always, everyone always mentions Scandinavia. Scandinavian countries seem to have a better culture of reading. There's a sort of Christmas tradition where everyone gets loads of books. It's got a particular name, but there seems to be a much... It's also a tradition in my house, actually. Exactly. I think this is a really kind of like national tradition they have where everyone gets books on Christmas Eve. And it does seem to be a symptom of these are societies in which books are just like much more central and much more culturally prominent.

11:19And again, coming back to what we're saying on the main podcast is I think there's a cultural thing. And it's less that we should be looking for societies that have some amazing pieces of legislation that the government mandates you to spend half an hour reading Proust every morning. And more that we should be looking at what are people doing successfully culturally about reading, about making reading like a desirable status of activity.

11:41Amol Rajan:Can I ask for your support for my campaign to bring rote learning into schools? Rote learning of poetry. It could be your poetry. It could be Shakespeare. It could be Milton. It's got to be basically pre-18th century because that's where the good stuff is, which I think increases the confidence that people feel in terms of their facility with language. It invites them to participate in a great sort of culture. It gives them a friend for life. It provides a point of connection with people who are often richer and posher than them and have often had a better education with them. can I sign you up for my personal campaign which is being launched through this podcast to champion oracy in our schools you completely can I'm such a I mean I'm such a rote learning fanatic like you and the thing that drives me nuts is this whole idea of critical thinking which is very fashionable at the moment that you've got to teach people how to think but if you don't have any facts in your brain how do you think I anybody who's had any experience of thinking and you know whenever I write an opinion column it's not how can I apply my abstract critical thinking to the world.

12:39It's like, how can I join together a load of facts that exist in my brain because they've been stored in my memory and then create new ideas about the world? That is the only way that thinking happens. And critical thinking can't happen without memorizing, in my view.

12:52Amol Rajan:Okay, this is incredibly important. And I actually want to ask you about this, because in a way, this goes to Nicole's question. Maybe it's just who I follow online, but there is a very, very, very widespread, it's almost a meme, actually widespread thing, which is people saying, why are we doing education in the same way they did it in the Victorian ages? Why are we doing education where you're learning to memorize facts in order to regurgitate them in exams and therefore just kind of, you know, learn the same stuff they were learning 300 years ago? That's not what education should be. One of the people who says that, by the way, is Jimmy Donaldson, better known as Mr.

13:24Amol Rajan:Beast, who's probably the most famous person in the world after Donald Trump by some measures, certainly to his hundreds of millions of followers he is. On some measures, his YouTube videos are seen by 2 % of humanity. This point this idea that we're getting education completely wrong because we need to remodel it so it's fit for the new world, do you think it might end up kind of jeopardising education by throwing out something that we've learnt quite well for a long time, which is it's quite reasonable to learn critical theory after you've got a base of knowledge? Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I'm very influenced by, I don't know if we come across Daisy Christodoulou, who's really persuaded me on all this stuff.

13:58I think in a way, you know, you just have to look at the test scores. We know that a lot of international metrics of student learning are declining. PISA scores are declining. In America, these things called NEEP scores are declining. That kind of suggests that what we're doing isn't the right thing. I mean, the thing also that seems to be a real problem is the idea of e-learning, that having an iPad is going to make learning easier. There's good data, again, to suggest that the introduction of iPads into schools and everybody's going to learn on their laptop has actually decreased test scores.

14:25And we now know that one of the privileges of going to private school is now that you're much more likely to learn with a pen and a paper and with a teacher standing at the front of the class teaching you rather than on a screen. And I think it's a thing that is maybe a little bit difficult for us to get our heads around in the modern world where we want everything to be efficient, everything to be easy, and everything to be entertaining. We think entertainment is like the ultimate good. Some things in life are just hard and some things you've got to force into your brain with a pen and a paper and it's going to be difficult and learning is difficult.

14:54And that's a good thing. that's one of the good things about learning and that's what makes it rewarding and the idea that we can just make it easy and never memorize a fact and never write an essay i think is more dangerous than ever because we know the entire rest of the world wants to make everything easy

15:07Amol Rajan:and wants to make us not think but can i just abuse my proximity to this might by asking another question because it is pertinent to the ones that we've received there's a weird kind of political divide on this which i've never understood i'd just be interested to know what you think i really would it seems to be the case that it's now thought of as kind of right-wing slash conservative slash traditionalist to argue along the lines you just have for a quote, very much unquote, a kind of an old-fashioned education. And it used to be rather different. I mean, Orwell, who, okay, he's very conservative and national, patriotic in lots of ways, but he was a self-described democratic socialist.

15:41Amol Rajan:Richard Hoggart, he was a socialist who wrote the uses of literacy. And he was someone very much on the left who talked about old-fashioned learning. And even in this country, it used to be that on the left, there was this kind of really strong belief in the emancipatory power of, if you like, an old-fashioned view of education, hence grammar schools. I don't really understand the origin of that new political divide in education. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, like so many arbitrary political divides, especially in things that are slightly cultural or coded, it's more vibe-based than anything else.

16:13And I think clearly there's some vibe that the way we did things in the past is like the conservative opinion. Disciplinarian, authoritarian, and sort of tough on kids. exactly but i i think kids love learning by heart i mean exactly i did i loved learning poetry when i got the opportunity to it's fun like learning your times tables and your phrase i mean insofar as learning is fun it's often not fun but like these are things that you can master you can do you can sing songs to get them in your head i think kids like all this and i think it's a mistake to think that the most fun kind of learning automatically happens with an ipad i think it's people like knowing stuff like it's one of the nice things about being a kid and being at school if you like school as i did is like you know you get to know stuff and you get facts in your head Kids love facts.

16:50Kids are always obsessed with facts about dinosaurs. I think you can speak to what kids actually want from school by giving them facts.

16:56Amol Rajan:If you're a young person who likes facts, try Hard Times by Charles Dickens, which begins with Thomas Gradgrine banging on about facts. And I was so obsessed with facts as a student newspaper journalist that I actually printed off that front page and stuck it up in the newspaper. Oh, God, we're rolling back the years here. That was the kind of young man I was. Thank you very much indeed for that question, Nicole. Much appreciated. Sorry to ask some supplementary ones, but hey, it's interesting. and I present this podcast so I sometimes abuse the power. Paul in East Yorkshire asks, James, do you consider the root cause of our loss of interest in reading and focused tasks is more down to our stressful lives, full of things demanding our attention and hopelessness caused by world situations that we can't affect?

17:36Amol Rajan:In fact, maybe social media, whilst adding to the issue, is more a symptom rather than a cause. That's interesting. Which came first, social media or kind of the pessimism on which so much social media seems to riff? Totally social media. I do come across this argument in some places that actually we shouldn't blame phones. People have tough lives. Modern life is so stressful. It's just hard to sit down and read a novel in the evenings in the way that used to be 50 years ago. I think that's totally wrong. I think if you read people like Richard Hoggart, people like Jonathan Rose, his book, The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Class, this culture of autodidact learning and autodidact study that existed among people who lived lives who lived lives that were unbelievably impoverished and unbelievably miserable and unbelievably stressful relative to the modern world existed.

18:22Jonathan Rose's book is full of factory workers who spend all day at the loom or all day down the mine and then they'll go and do an evening class on Edward Gibbon and I think it's a kind of real useful reminder to modern people who think our lives are stressful and that we're having a horrible time. Undoubtedly many of us are. these people had it much worse and they found plenty of time for reading and i think that just shows and i think made their lives better you know they had a stressful life and they made their lives better by reading and i think it goes that way around what do you understand what do you mean by autodidact self-taught yeah self-taught there's real culture that existed in the late 19th early middle of the 20th century of people who had no formal education were denied formal education by class structures, the way society is organised, were voluntarily going out to evening classes or in their own homes, like reading long, difficult books to give themselves educations.

19:11And then many of them becoming like MPs, political activists, active in their community. I think it's such an important 20th century story.

19:18Amol Rajan:Well, my parents didn't become MPs or activists, but they were both extraordinarily poor growing up. And they're both two of the cleverest people you could ever meet. And they were all, you know, very much autodidacts. For the Fleet Street aficionados who listen to this podcast, and I know there are many, perhaps even more, because we've got James from the Times on. If you know the late, great Ian Jack, who was the editor of The Independent on Sunday during the 1990s, he was one of the great autodidacts. Not someone with a huge formal education, but my goodness, he was smart. And he taught himself.

19:46Amol Rajan:Final question from Joshua. Joshua says, who also got in touch on Instagram. Thank you very much indeed, Joshua. Joshua says, I know James bravely undertook a social media detox and got rid of his mobile phone. Based on this, what's his solution or his thoughts on banning social media for under 16-year-olds. Yeah, I'm hardlining all this stuff. I'm totally radicalised. Ban it. And I think the real danger is that we seem to have got ourselves into this position as a society where we view smartphones as completely necessary. And if you don't have a smartphone at the age of 16, then that's a disaster.

20:18And how on earth are you going to run your life? 30 years ago, 20 years ago, we were doing it. I didn't have a smartphone until pretty much, or didn't have a phone until I really went to university. and I think yeah part of the cultural change you're talking about will be slightly losing this mad idea that we seem to get ourselves into that everybody needs to be connected at all times and if you don't have a Facebook account or a Twitter account or if you're walking home from school without a phone that's in some way a kind of frightening and natural place to be

20:43Amol Rajan:that is the natural place to be when the Australians introduced this ban uh this sort of I think it's a ban on social media for under 16s there I spoke on the today program to a couple of australian teenagers who were uh fighting it legally because they said that their human rights i don't mean this is sort of satirically a pastiche of a kind of human rights whatever they were saying that their kind of basic rights as a teenager were being denied and that they were going to lose out quite substantially because they weren't going to be given access to their phones i think that's backwards i think your human rights are being denied by a phone that is inhibiting especially if you're a teenager and your brain is still growing inhibiting your ability to learn inhibiting your ability to focus inhibiting your ability to experience reality in a normal way i think that's is there solid evidence on that stuff that owning a smartphone and being on social media when you've got a developing brain does inhibit your brain's development yeah i think it seems to be bad for developing brains joshua i think you could if you're part of the smartphone free childhood movement joshua i think you can count james marriott an ally in that particular endeavor um thank you so much to everyone for all of your questions thank you to James it's wonderful to meet you you know it's really really I'm glad to meet you too I'm really really really glad to do it and I read your columns with such enjoyment and enlightenment I'm very glad to meet you too you were a disembodied voice to me before you exist in reality you don't just exist in the radio yeah yeah or indeed on a smartphone thank you so much for all your questions thank you for answering them James I'll be back with another episode of Radical on Thursday until then goodbye

22:48It all starts with a subscription to bbc.com and a BBC app. Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited.