It’s only when you reread the old stories, perhaps as a child, that you realize the extent to which the characters still live in your head, floating around just below the level of consciousness. Decades after I first read them, I still puzzle over the Brothers Grimm stories. How could Little Red Riding Hood have avoided being eaten? (We read the original, merciless version.) What should Hansel and Gretel have done?

Every good book leaves a mark, but the characters from the books you loved as a child stay with you. They shape the way you think as an adult, and that is why it is so sad and significant that children everywhere in the West have stopped reading.

On the next three pages this week Viewersour authors reveal which characters from their children’s books still haunt them. Rod Liddle’s head is full of imaginary rabbits; Rory Sutherland admires Dr. Seuss’ anarchic cat with a hat. Lionel Shriver identifies with Pippi Longstocking: “I have always identified with characters in fairy tale books who don’t do what they are told.” This applies to most of our authors – Richmal Compton’s William Brown appears so regularly in our survey that I now consider him to be the guiding spirit of The audienceand I am proud of it.

Meanwhile, this summer’s What Kids Are Reading report, a study of more than 1.2 million pupils across the UK, shows a 4.4 per cent drop in the number of books children are reading compared to last year. A survey of British teachers found that they would describe a third of their pupils as “weak readers” who struggle to keep up with the curriculum. (And the curriculum really isn’t difficult to follow.) The National Literacy Trust’s (NLT) latest annual literacy survey, published in September last year, found an alarming 26 per cent drop in the number of children reading for pleasure every day since 2005. Fewer than half of our children now say they enjoy reading. Professor Keith Topping of the University of Dundee, who analysed the NLT data, was quoted as saying: “The key finding is that more reading practice at an appropriate level of difficulty improves student performance.” I’m not sure what that means, except that we have a problem when people in the literacy business use phrases like “key finding”.

Ironically, while the art of reading is dying out, there is growing scientific evidence of how valuable and beneficial reading is for a young brain. It’s not just about vocabulary or acquiring information; there is now a demonstrable link between reading and empathy. Brain scans of children engrossed in novels show additional connections snaking through their cerebellums as they inhabit each character. When a child is really engrossed in a novel, reading about a swimmer, for example, activates the same parts of their brain as if they were swimming themselves. “Novels are a kind of simulation that runs not on computers but on brains,” says Keith Oatley, a professor who studies the psychology of novels.

I recently read my son a favorite book from my own childhood: Where the red fern grows by the American Wilson Rawls. And in doing so, I rediscovered the images that I had created as an eight-year-old and that had stuck with me throughout the plot. What was interesting to me was that the images I had conjured up were from the hero’s perspective, as if I were that boy with his dogs in the Ozarks in Oklahoma. The film of the book, which we later watched, was a distant drone perspective.

The NLT is excited about these brain research results. In its latest pro-reading campaign, it urges people to read to improve their empathy levels. Empathy as self-improvement! This is definitely a sign of the times.

The NLT could also take a line from the late American philosopher Allan Bloom, who insisted that great fiction gives us an understanding not only of other people but of ourselves. I still remember the horrible realization that, like the evil Edmund from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobecould have betrayed my siblings for some of the White Witch’s delicious Turkish delight. In fact, I still think sometimes how delicious it must have been. It’s useful to know that about yourself, and oddly reassuring to find it in print. That’s real representation.

The most obvious and undeniable cause of the great reading slump is screens. How could it be otherwise? I’ve lost count of how many adults have confessed to me that the presence of their smartphones has brought fiction reading to a complete halt. It’s impossible to immerse yourself in another world when your iPhone is next to you, tugging at you like Gollum’s ring. And if adults can’t resist, how can we expect children to?

“Why can’t you read a book?” I ask my son irritably as I type away on my phone. “Mom,” he says, “seriously!” So I spontaneously buy a few novels from Amazon to maintain my image of myself as a reader and pile the unread books in the hallway.

Generations Z and Alpha, who have seen the biggest decline in reading for pleasure, report being too eager to read, which sounds silly but makes sense. The rhythm of social media is insane. All the endless video clips are cut off before their cliffhanger-style resolution to ensure kids keep scrolling. You can’t immerse yourself in another world if you’re in a permanent fight-or-flight state.

Nevertheless, I am confident that the message of the smartphone is getting through to at least the middle classes. Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have warned us convincingly about the dangers of social media, and I predict that sending your teenager to school with a Nokia will soon become the virtue signal of choice in north London.

But the decline in reading habits is not just due to screens. There is a worse and more worrying cause. Last spring, American author and editor Katherine Marsh wrote an article in the Atlantic Magazine entitled “Why Kids Don’t Fall in Love with Reading.” Marsh’s theory was that it’s the way schools in the West teach literature that actually turns kids off: the endless focus on analysis and the lack of enthusiasm for stories.

Marsh gives the example of the way Amelia Bedelia – a popular American book series for under-10s by Peggy Parish – is taught. Amelia Bedelia is funny. She is a hapless housekeeper who takes instructions too literally. For example, if you tell her to draw the curtains, she will pull out a pencil. But students don’t get a chance to enjoy Amelia’s antics. In class, they are told not to worry about the actual story or even read the book to the end, but to just look at a single paragraph and recognize the non-literal and figurative language it contains.

“For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of exciting,” writes Marsh. “The best way to get an abstract idea across to children is to get them excited about the story. ‘Non-literal language’ becomes much more interesting and understandable, especially to eight-year-olds, if they’ve been able to laugh at Amelia’s antics first… Jumping into a paragraph halfway through a book is about as engaging for most children as tidying their room.”

Marsh’s article rang a bleak bell for me. My son is lucky to have a principal who values ​​real reading and good books above all else, but for decades I have heard my friends with older children complain about this test-based method – and then complain, without connecting the thoughts, that their children are not reading for fun. For Marsh, the terrible result of the dismal, assessment-based approach to literature is that children divide fiction into boring books and “entertaining” books. The great works of literature are boring. The Goose flesh Series and Greg’s diary are “fun” (and if this whining maggot is what has stuck in our children’s minds, it’s no wonder they’re all depressed). Marsh did not mention Allan Bloom in her article, although his 1987 book The closing of the American mind predicted and described the same problem to an astonishing extent. “When I first noticed the decline in reading in the late 1960s,” he writes, “I began to ask my students which books were really important to them. Most of them remain silent and confused by the question. The idea that books provide company is alien to them.”

If children in the 21st century do not consider books to be good company, it is probably because books bother them. Many of them are as tiresomely politicized as the damaging (but successful) series Little people, big dreams – about the lives of people like Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Emmeline Pankhurst and Greta Thunberg – which are not stories, but just mini-lectures that repeat the tried and tested slogan: Show the system, kids. Is that what children want to read, or just what their parents want to buy for them? In any case, they do not spark a lifelong love of reading.

The old stories that we loved and that fed our desire to read more and more were often written by authors who did not even imagine that they were writing for children, let alone indoctrinating them politically. “You have to write the book that wants to be written,” said Madeleine L’Engle (The Wrinkle in Time). “And if the book is too difficult for adults, then you write it for children.” By the way, for a wonderful overview of reading in childhood, I recommend The enchanted foreststraight out of The audience‘s literary editor, Sam Leith.

It is these living books that wanted to be written that people in education often have the greatest aversion to. I have a friend whose son was warned against Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton on the grounds that they were out of date. Last summer in Scotland I found a book by Biggles with a warning from the publisher on page one: “This book has been reprinted for historical interest only. It is not suitable for children.”

My son’s favorite Blyton series, written by him, is about a young detective called Fatty because his initials are FAT and because he’s fat. “He’s not fat!” my son declared earnestly, backing up his claim by reading aloud the publisher’s note in his new edition: “All references to his size have been removed from the 2016 text, so Fatty’s nickname refers only to his initials.”

Children pick up clues quickly. They read these little clues and get the message: Don’t get involved with these authors and their dangerous stories. Resist the temptation to dive into the book. Read only what you need to read to pass the test, then quickly return to the screen.