One in three children in London doesn't own a book. One in four 11-year-olds cannot read properly. One million adult Londoners are functionally illiterate.
These are the headline findings of the London Evening Standard in its ‘exposé’ this week of the high levels of illiteracy in the capital. Though Londoners have the lowest levels of literacy in the country, the picture overall is little better. Once a luxury reserved for the wealthy and the powerful, today reading is a basic requirement for full participation in society: if you can’t read, you can’t drive, you can’t check cinema times, you can’t make informed choices in the supermarket.
Inability to read, though, does not just lead to minor inconveniences and frustrations, but to exclusion from the basic functionality of society. How do you find work if you can’t even scan the job ads? Feeling marginalised and frustrated leads to anger, rebellion and, eventually, crime: 48% of prisoners have the reading age of a seven-year-old or younger.
Much has been made this year of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the ‘King James Version’ of the Bible, and the associated revolutionary idea of making the Christian scriptures available and accessible to all. Less news coverage has been given to the anniversary of the founding, 200 years later, of the method by which this dream would actually become a reality: The National Society for Promoting Religious Education.
At the beginning of the anniversary year, Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, President of the National Society, said: "Universal free education in England began when the Church of England introduced schools in every parish - more than 50 years before the provision of state education.” These schools, and the 192 ‘Ragged schools’ which sprang up later in the 19th century, grasped what we seem to have forgotten today: that education is not just about achieving targets and passing exams, but about becoming rounded human beings.
Both the National Society’s schools’ and the Ragged schools’ curricula taught children to read and write, understanding that this would give them access to a world beyond their parent’s reach, but also taught them the skills they needed to flourish in every area of life. Religious teaching was seen as a key part of this. There is more to life than skills and trades, it was held, children need to learn about what life as a relational being requires, and the Bible was the perfect teaching tool. Through it, children could be taught the principles of morality and living well, but could also be introduced to the God who is the source of those principles and gives the strength to follow them.
This kind of teaching built on and affirmed the goals of men such as Tyndale and Coverdale who had, long before King James’ scholars translated the Bible into English that every man could understand, aimed to make the word of God available to everyone. If the people could not read the scriptures, they were vulnerable to the tyranny of any scholar or monarch using them to his own ends. Reading the Bible allowed for freedom from religious tyranny. It was a brave move, since being able to read the Bible also meant being able to challenge – and reject – its teachings.
And so it is with education today – the ability to read enables one to engage with the prevailing ideas of and teachings in society, and to accept or reject them on their merits. Those who seek to suppress the teaching of religion show less courage than those who once sought to provide it: their fear that people might accept the teachings of the Bible or other sacred texts drives them to hide these subversive books rather than trusting people to evaluate the truth for themselves.
Education for our children needs to be improved, not merely so they can function well in society and have access to good jobs and great literature, but so that they can seek the truth and find freedom.
Jennie Pollock is Executive Administrator of Theos
