From the Headmaster’s Desk: The Reading Mind
Why reading matters for our children
Education is being attempted these days in an information ecosystem unlike any humanity has known before, and it raises an urgent question: how should the flow of information into our children’s minds be managed? The question matters not solely in terms of content – what gets in. It also matters in terms of method – how it gets in – because the tools used to educate our children themselves have a powerful formative influence upon the minds they develop and, in turn, the type of people they become.
I recently finished a remarkable new book called The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society by James Marriott. In recent years, I have found various books helpful as I have tried to make sense of the social and cultural revolution we are living through and my instinctive deep concern. To my mind, Marriott’s book comes the closest yet to articulating the serious nature of the threat we are facing and the underlying reasons why a book-and-paper-based education is more relevant than ever. In this article, I will focus my reflections around Chapter 1: The Reading Mind.
The reading revolution
My first assembly last year was about ‘the greatest invention ever’ – writing. In the late fourth millennium BC, the Sumerians and the Egyptians invented systems for writing, and a couple of millennia later the Phoenicians took it to a whole new level with the alphabet. Marriott picks up the theme and explains that writing was crucial to the emergence of the earliest civilisations because it enabled new and highly complex forms of social organisation that would have been unmanageable in an oral society. But, more than that, writing and reading would, he argues, gradually transform human consciousness.
In the slow journey towards mass literacy, the invention of the printing press in the 15th century was the turning point, but it wasn’t until the 18th century that reading really took off. This was the reading revolution, and it was, according to Marriott, one of the most important events in history. So significant has been the impact of reading upon the modern world that it has been linked by historians to the development of science, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of human rights, the rise of capitalism and the advent of modern democracy.
The advantages of reading
Each of these cultural developments, of course, has myriad causes, like a great river fed by many streams. Why is it that many have considered reading to be such an important tributary to every one of them?
The answer, and the central thesis of Marriott’s book, is that reading has shaped for the better the way we think. Its influence has been so significant that he describes literacy as ‘one of the substructures of modernity’ (p. 10). ‘Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded,’ he says, ‘on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy’ (p. 3). It’s a big claim and a serious one, and it generates the concern behind Marriott’s book: what might happen when this Jenga block gets pulled out?
Before trying to answer that question, we need to probe further into the way books have positively shaped us and our culture. What advantages belong to the Reading Mind? Drawing on Marriott’s book, and acknowledging my debt to other writers like Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr and Johan Hari, here’s a start:
- A mind that is relatively orderly, because books require knowledge or a story to be well organised and presented sequentially;
- A mind that is relatively patient, able to follow a story or line of thought through to its conclusion;
- A mind capable of empathy, because it is used to entering emotionally into the experience or perspective of others;
- A mind accustomed to sustained attention, because it has regularly had the experience of being immersed in a text;
- A mind practised in examining truth claims, since writing lays bare the quality of an argument and encourages scrutiny;
- A mind that is more objective, because seeing thoughts in print (including one’s own) helps us stand apart from them, and because entering into a different culture or period helps us look back on our own from a distance;
- A mind that habitually makes connections, as new knowledge is taken on board and integrated with one’s prior understanding;
- A mind that is imaginative and creative, used to picturing alternative worlds and able to conceptualise new possibilities;
- A mind capable of nuance, subtlety and proportion, because books set knowledge or characters in a bigger, multi-faceted context;
- A mind more accustomed to abstract thought, relatively able to conceptualise high principles or ideals and orientate other thoughts and actions in relation to them, rather than thinking solely in relation to particulars or the immediate.
Marriott compares the advantages of text-based thinking to conversation and improvised speech. ‘When we talk,’ he says, ‘we are free to ramble, to make unsupported statements, to indulge in logical non sequiturs, to jump from topic to topic as the mood takes us…’ adding that ‘if we are charming we will get away with this much more easily’! He observes such tendencies in podcast culture. When reading over the transcript of a podcast he participated in, he was struck by how relatively feeble his oral argument looked ‘on the austerity of the printed page’ (p. 26).
Perhaps the greatest advantage of writing and reading is that it forces the mind, as Marriott explains, into a slowed down pattern. Writers painstakingly go over their thoughts precisely and in detail, cutting out redundant ones, until they have worked out the best version of what they want to say. Readers are the beneficiaries, but they also have to slow down and think along with the author. Drawing attention to a work of philosophy like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Marriott observes that without writing the patient construction of and careful interaction with such a sophisticated and nuanced edifice of thought would be literally impossible. It’s just too complicated. Only books make the most careful forms of thought possible.
Books are a gift to us
Considering the impressive range of advantages that belong to the Reading Mind, it might be tempting to attribute too much to, or place too much hope upon, books per se. That would be a mistake. The human spirit is far too unruly and turbulent to be tamed merely by reading. What goes in, not just how it goes in, matters. Ultimately, it is truth, not books, that liberates. We know that there are good books and bad books and everything in between. Optimism should also be tempered by the fact that the powers of mind developed through writing and reading have been used for good, yes, but far too often for ill.
Even after such qualifications Marriott’s apology for writing and reading remains forceful. Books have an inherent camber which inclines thinking in ways that are highly beneficial, and it is a fact of history that the ability to make thoughts permanent and then share them has, more than any other invention, channelled and unleashed human intellectual potential. It has enabled a succession of cumulative advances over the centuries, leading to towering organisational, scientific and technological achievements inconceivable to pre-literate humanity.
Books have been a great gift to us, like fire. They have also opened up uniquely effectively a richer exploration into the nature of our humanity. In ways less accessible to the post-literate mind, the Reading Mind is well equipped to probe truth sensitively. It is significant that in the Christian view Truth is also Word, whose image we bear and through whom the universe was made.
That writing and reading are outstanding tools for interior and intellectual development is beyond doubt, and it remains as true today as ever. The more we read, the more we will benefit. That is, after all, the way neuroplasticity and habit formation work. When we think or act in a certain way repeatedly, it becomes easier or more likely that we will keep thinking or acting the same way, a fact which underscores the urgency of reading throughout childhood, when habits for life are laid down comparatively effortlessly. Neuroplasticity also means, however, that if reading habits are not where we might wish them to be for our children or for ourselves, we should take heart. It is never too late to renew our efforts to build better reading habits into our own lives or reset the culture of the home.
Abundant provision and orderly serving
I draw Marriott’s book to your attention because it opens up some of the reasons why Heritage is what it is, why books, reading on paper, and writing by hand will always be central to our approach, and why we are a smartphone- and screen-free school. Given the immense power of the visual forces at work in our culture it is also essential that we work together.
Charlotte Mason saw clearly that children’s minds need ample, varied and regular servings of ‘mind food’ if they are to grow healthy and strong, and that the most important place and the most effective manner to procure it is in books. ‘We must open books to children, the best books;’ she wrote, ‘our own concern is abundant provision and orderly serving.’
My hope is that, together, we can enfold our children in a bookish culture both at home and school and so cultivate in them the unique and increasingly rare attributes that are the treasured possession of a Reading Mind, for their own sake and for the common good.
Jason Fletcher
Headmaster, Heritage School
October 2026
