Estrangement from the Past

 'Universities are teaching English Literature students how to concentrate long enough to read lengthy novels. Some institutions are offering "reading resilience" courses to students...' So begins a news story in The Times, the rest of which is unfortunately concealed behind a paywall, but I think we get the gist: it's a phenomenon that has been remarked a good many times in recent years, on both sides of the pond (for example in this piece in The Atlantic last year). It certainly seems to be the case that less and less is being asked of schoolchildren in the way of reading hefty, serious stuff, and as a result they never face the challenge of ploughing through something long and demanding. I don't think it's the length as such that is proving so daunting, though – many of these children will have read volume after fat volume of Harry Potter, and probably Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and other fantasy novels. Indeed, if length was the problem, publishers would surely be bringing out shorter books, but there is no sign of that: as I might have remarked before, most current books are around a third too long. No, reading stamina isn't really the problem – rather, it is the challenge of reading something unfamiliar and demanding, especially something from ages that had very different preoccupations from our own. I would suggest that the root of the problem is an estrangement from the past, a lack of historical and cultural perspective, of a sound rooting in history and in what people have written and made and how they thought in past centuries. If your knowledge of such things is made up of a few random snapshots and samples, you are going to have a real problem tackling the classic works of the past, and they will be much more daunting that they need be. Sadly, schools seem to be largely failing to instil any real sense of history, of its continuity with the present, of how the present is imbued with it, a product of it. Without that grounding, students are inevitably going to struggle. Their education, and the culture they inhabit, have left them stranded in a kind of eternal present, from which it is going to be a real challenge to escape. I count myself lucky to have benefited from a grammar school education that forced me to tackle the hard stuff, and left me in no doubt that the past mattered at least as much as the paltry concerns of the present, and was every bit as real.