I promised myself a week to write. Yesterday, I did just that.
The plan for the new book is now with three publishers and an agent. I heard what people said here.
The first chapter is in draft, but needs editing, and a bit of work has been done on the second.
It is amazing how much time is available in a day when I do not work on videos. I was, however, well short of my highest-ever word count, which I think was produced when drafting the final chapter of The Joy of Tax. There were 9,400 words in that chapter, and they were written in a day.
That is why I found yesterday's PISA educational attainment data from the OECD disappointing. I should say that the style of mechanical replication ability these tests measure is not what I think is most important in education or in determining life outcomes. The OECD awards no marks for the most important characteristic that any education system should encourage, which is curiosity, but it is troubling nonetheless that reading ability is moving backwards, and quickly.
As the Guardian notes the OECD saying:
The long-term declines in performance suggest deeper structural issues within education systems, with challenges at the school and system level. These include changing attitudes towards reading, the impact of digital distractions on students and rising levels of absenteeism.
Reading ability is slipping, markedly, and COVID is no longer the determining factor. It seems that tech and alienation from an education system and society that no longer provides answers to questions that young people feel are relevant to them is the real issue.
I know so many young people who almost proudly say they never read a book, and have not written a word beyond the length of a text message since leaving school. As someone who finds the idea of life without the written word almost incomprehensible, I confess to being more than a little saddened by that.
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Not in my house! My two read a lot of books – as do we, their parents. There will always be people who go against the grain.
Mine, too. Always, it seems.
My Kindle goes everywhere I do. In every idle moment in a waiting room or cafe I can choose between whimsical fiction, educational history or cross-check a reference to the King James bible or the complete works of Shakespeare.
You’re never lonely with a book to read.
I always have a novel on the go on Kindle
Yes, I know it is Amazon..
Kudos to the late Dolly Parton, for her amazing counter-cultural work on child literacy. I have a nephew in Tennesee who has a personalised set of books from Dolly’s scheme.
Good luck with the book.
They shifted young people ‘s developing brains onto screens – it seems imevitable.
I have broken my right wrist and find the inability to write for weeks a different life – less able to organise, but much eventually deeper reflection and presence. its been an interesting enforced experiment
I type as little as possible: I suspect I have dyspraxia when it comes ot keyboards. Dictation solves the problem, but I have forty years of practice. Good luck wth the wrist.
I had a friend who was an HMI His Majesty Inspector of schools, in Design Technology. He and most of his colleagues are in agreement with you that the tests measure more mechanical skills.
The maximum score is 600. England attained 497 in reading and Scotland 488. That is less than a 2% difference. OECD average 463. Wales is the lowest of the four nations of the UK and even they are about 1% below the OECD average. Scotland, Northern Ireland and England are in the top 20%. We need take the comments of politicians with a pinch of salt.
But, I agree 100% the lack of reading is something to worry about.
Humans had language for a long time before it was written. If debate and critical thinking were taught in school, I would be more sanguine about the poor reading, but I think it bodes ill; it looks like ‘what’s the point’ yet we do need to be literate to navigate the world.
I give up at times; all the online contracts for every service are far too long and hard to focus on, yet I rely heavily on reading for information and entertainment. Does anyone read these online contracts, and the updates, and get more than the gist? I feel unequal to it, ‘they’ have the power, I rarely have a meaningful alternative, so I concede my tick in the box. Maybe too much of life looks that way to many secondary pupils.
Life is just too short to read all that guff. And we are still left with ‘take it or leave it’.
This is important, Richard.
Cloudflare Threatens to Cut Google Off From Their Publishers in Searches Due to AI Scraping | naked capitalism
I have noticed that many sites I visit – about music, literature, whatever, are using Cloudflare to stop AI theft. Your book will very likely get stolen, without accreditation. I’m an IT bumpkin, but my clever kids are incandescent about intellectual property theft.
This whole site is stolen, I am sure, without accreditation.
When I used to run 2 charity *.org.uk websites, “screen scraping” became a bit of the thing (around 2012). I had to be my own IT consultant, and knew v. little about it.
I read up on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and fellow privacy campaigners helped me with my primitive kindergarten level html and php code.
We wanted to “help” the scrapers and redirected them to places where they would be well fed with time-consuming digital garbage, and learned to write simple php scripts on special landing pages, to generate such garbage specially for them, if they ignored our Ts & Cs. All v David & Goliath stuff, but it made me feel better, I objected to theft. Still do.
I remember writing to Michael O’Leary, of Ryan Air to warn him of screen scraping of his airline site by BT/Phorm. He sounded quite annoyed about it, I still have his reply.
As I now count as being old, I am having a first hand view of aging, and finding out, by reading, that the general view is that the brain is still malleable, it doesn’t become inflexible, unless that is what you train it to become. It takes what a person does as the template for what it needs to be. Skills that aren’t used will fade. Reading, and writing, are activities I enjoy. Doom scrolling kills them. But that is the fare served up on your phone or tablet every minute/hour/day you do it; a habit to be rejected. My dopamine hit no longer comes from there.
Much to agree with.
I learn every day.
I taught for over 20 years having not started until my early 40s. I was often not happy with the curriculum and the methods required. It often felt so out of date and inapproriate to the needs of the pupils.
Sir Ken Robinson also viewed curiosity as the overriding missing ingredient in our teaching.
A lot of time and effort has gone into combating plagiarism. I have often put forward the idea of insisting that examinees use all available internet tools and are then marked on their critique of what they have found and the breadth of their searches, not the subject matter. This is even more necessary with the advent of AI.
Daniel Susskind writing recently in the Guardian is possibly relevant here.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/06/daniel-susskind-father-studies-ai-artificial-intelligence-what-parents-need-know?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
He also points to the importance of reading and writing.
If AI is a source of information, use it, appraise it, analyse it, argue with it. Show curiosity about what it does not say. Remember, Socrates distrusted writing; he thought it would destroy memory and reasoning.
When I was about 6 or 7 years old, I discovered a red brick building at the end of the road near to my home. It was a library donated to the people many years previously by the philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie. I know he was a very wealthy American who obviously believed reading was the door to a greater understanding of the world. I later found out that Mr Carnegie had provided the money for hundreds of public libraries. I don’t know how he made his money, but I believe he gave 90% of it away to help educate the public. My kind of capitalist.
That library became, for me, an instant delight. I couldn’t get enough reading, even though I didn’t neglect the call of street footie and cricket. I am still on that journey 70 years later, regretting only that I won’t have enough lifetimes to read all the books or learn all the things my curious mind would wish to.
Reading and learning are surely the best ways to deal with sadness or setbacks because they cannot ever be exhausted by one person. I always treat them both as old, familiar friends, doing both whenever I can. I also find time to watch tv sport and drama, yet have never played computer games. I may be missing something there.
Best of luck with the book. I know its purpose will be to enlighten others, but it might be useful to us all if it sneaked into the best sellers lists.
Thank you.
And I like your enthusiasm.
I do hope that there will be rankings for which States are the most courageous and which are the least. A bit like the Fraser Institute for economic freedom, there are ratings and you can see if countries are moving up, down or standing still, and it’s a useful tool to go back and look at whether economic freedom matches up with the things that really matter in life such as satisfaction, health, family and a clean environment.
I would put the current Burnham administration up there as the most courageous of my lifetime, but there have to be seriously thought through metrics for judging this, not just words from a lectern, so I’ll give him a couple of years.
There will not be.
I see little point in such things.
Have they ever changed anything?
And we will have to disagree on Burnham.
I find that very interesting, I’ve been enjoying fiction since a very young age. But since I discovered social media in my retirement my reading has started slipping. I picked up a Ken Follett a few days ago and I was a bit concerned to discover that after about half a page my attention was starting to slip. The screen age is definitely to blame.
Just purchased the book “The New Dark Ages” The end of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society
Plan on reading during plane flight next week going on holiday.