Let Children Be the Judge of a Good Book

Force-feeding the 'right’ sort of literature to the young can put them off for life, says Michael Morpurgo in the Telegraph.

From the piece...

When I was seven years old, my stepfather handed me a novel to read. It was a yellowing copy of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens – a story which he had enjoyed as a child. He wasn’t trying to be nasty to me, but I’m afraid I didn’t like it at all. The print was small, it was far too long, and the language was complicated. My stepfather, by trying to hurry me towards good literature, succeeded only in putting me off Dickens for years.

As I judged entries for the first “Wicked Young Writers Award” – launched this year to develop writing talent in people aged between five and 25 in the UK, with the winners to be announced today – I was, from time to time, reminded of this problem. Well-meaning parents say to their children: you ought to read this, because it’s the sort of thing you should read at your age. They treat literature as a kind of medicine or tool. But the children pick up on it quickly: they resist it and they become fearful, as I did when confronted by Dickens.

The reverse, thankfully, is also true. For a child, the most encouraging thing in the world is to have a parent or grandparent, auntie or teacher, who really loves what they are reading to you. I was lucky. My mother was an actor, who read Wordsworth and Kipling and Edward Lear to me – and who read with passion. I didn’t understand the half of it, of course, but I learnt to love the music in the words.