This week I gave an assembly about reading. Now, an English teacher asking pupils to read more books is not going to be the most controversial request they’re going to encounter this week, but I wanted to explore some other things as well. I wanted to ask if not reading books is making us unhappy?

I shared the famous picture of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses. As a photograph it remains powerful, not just because we see the iconic film star and model of the 1950s reading, but that in doing so she challenged the stereotype that someone who looks like Monroe could read something as difficult as Ulysses. 

I asked our pupils the question: “to what extent have we retreated from the idea that reading - that essentially isolating activity of the mind - is fundamental to our intellectual progress and, importantly, our happiness?”

We seem to have gone quite quickly from this isolated activity of reading alone, to never being alone. From paper to screens.

To an outsider, seeing someone looking at a a phone and someone looking at a book, look very similar. They could barely be called ‘activities’, but they can be profoundly different: the one essentially interior, the other exterior.  

The novelist EM Forster famously exclaimed the importance of connecting, and in doing so we will not be isolated, or live in 'fragments', any longer. He wrote:

”Only connect! …Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

It’s ironic a novelist urged us to do that, but understandable because we are social beings, and there is an urge to reach out, to not be just another face in the crowd. 

Another early 20th century writer wrote about how isolated we are in the modern age.  Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922, the same year as Ulysses, when Europe was still in fragments after the First World War.

Today, technology has empowered us to be connected, always on, all the time. To not live in fragments, but to be available. And many are exhausted by it.

The writer Henry Oliver puts it like this, arguing that increasingly we’re becoming nostalgic for the 1990s and 2000s.

‘Look around. People are dissatisfied. There are riots and lawlessness, an epidemic of poor mental health, and a trend for electing divisive politicians. Despite tremendous advances in technology and living standards, there is a widespread nostalgia for the 1990s and 2000s.’

Perhaps this partly explains the growing nostalgia for the un-connected 1990s. Some see that decade as an Oasis of sorts. There is a word for feeling nostalgic for something you’ve never experienced: anemoia. And many of this generation look back and miss those years, that sense of being unconnected.

There are other concerns. We are reading less - reading fewer long books - choosing instead to be online, connected.

But is it making us unhappy?

Is it making us less intelligent?

The changes to how we behave, and what we read, and how we wish to remain connected, have been quick. 

2010 saw the arrival of the iPhone 4 has front-facing camera, just two years later in 2012 Facebook buys Instagram and just one year later the word 'selfie' was names word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary.

Research shows us that anxiety levels are rising. I asked ChatGBT to create an image of the future based on some current headlines - the result was stark - fire, disruptions, chaos, darkness. How much of this is based on our online lives?

But it seems things may be changing, with older generations being more reluctant to consciously reduce their screen time than younger generations. Are parents and grandparents more reluctant to give up their phones than you?

There is no denying reading books takes up time, but it is always time well spent, and technology and books should not be seen as being in opposition to each other. 

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, was asked what advice would he give his younger self, he said “Read a lot and discover a skill you enjoy”.  Good advice.  And if you don’t yet know a skill you enjoy, just read a lot.

Be alone together with words.  Spend time on them, and you.

Or as Robert Graves put it, be wound in by a web of words, "There's a cool web of language winds us in".

Because if we are going to avoid living in a world that ChatGPT created then we are going to need your imaginations to do it. 

We all discover ourselves through language, and through language new ideas.

But that should be easy, given how much of our time is spent imagining. 

Reading gives you the framework for the imagination. 

As John Carey puts it: “Reading releases you from the limits of yourself.  Reading is freedom”.

Language has its limits, but we’ve never really discovered them yet. More optimistically when I asked Chat GBT to visualise ‘imagination’ the result was much more uplifting - an explosion of creativity, ideas and colour.

And reading allows you to not just help yourself, but help others. 

I shall end with a quotation by Hannah Barnes, a former pupil at LEH (Class of 2000).  She is now a highly successful journalist and broadcaster and recent LEH Be Bold! presenter.

She said this:

“One of the things that struck me as soon as I joined this school, was the confidence it had given so many of the girls and young women. I really hadn’t seen anything like it before.  You – and I – are so fortunate to have been given this education, and the opportunities that it opens.

Please use it to help others who aren’t so lucky. When you see something that doesn’t seem right, please speak out. Be bold! The chances are others share your concerns but maybe don’t have the skills, the confidence, or the words to act.   History teaches us that terrible things can happen when good people stay silent.

I have no doubt whatsoever that you are good people. Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable; it is painful, but it’s incredibly important. If something somebody wants in fact is not helping, we have a duty to say so, and to try something that does.

We can’t protect the most vulnerable or improve as a society without that.”