Bringing students to book

He can find inspiration in everything

I had one of those spluttering, what-on-earth-is-the-world-coming-to, moments yesterday afternoon (happens a lot in Baker World).

I was sitting in the office checking a story which has appeared in today’s Nottingham Post, and I must have been a proper sight: mouth open, skin turning purple and head shaking from side to side.

What left me in a state bordering on apoplexy was a story about a scheme set up by a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University to encourage his history students to read books for pleasure.
He was, the story said, “shocked at their reluctance to do so”.
I’ll bet he was. If university study is not about the exercise of an inquiring mind what on earth is it for?
Now, there may be two causes lurking underneath this issue. One is that the students on Nick Morton’s history course are effectively forced to read certain books. So may be after an afternoon scanning The Memoirs of George Sherston they’ve perhaps had enough Great War literature for one day, and would prefer to spend the evening listening to some popular music while sipping a bitter shandy (or something like that).
The alternative explanation – one favoured by paid-up GOMs like me – is that they are part of a generation which is slowly losing the reading habit because so much of the information it consumes is served up on a laptop-shaped plate.

As the very existence of this blog suggests, I have huge respect for laptops and anything which makes information more easily available (as long as someone pays for it!). But – and it’s an Everest-sized but as far as I’m concerned – I do not believe for one moment that everything I need, want or might benefit from knowing is best chosen by someone else.

While it is certainly convenient, I loathe Google’s habit of continually refining searches so that what is served up in the results is what IT thinks I should be told. Similarly, I detest the fact that it will serve up ads based on some of the words it has scanned in my emails (so I’ve turned AdWords off).

I’ve digressed. But it’s the same issue as the one Nick Morton is trying to get his apparently bibliophobic students to confront. Read what you have to, by all means, but don’t stop there. Do what I do – go into Waterstones, look in a section that you know nothing about, and find a book which introduces you to it.

One of my favourite phrases in life is one uttered by the Nottingham fashion legend Sir Paul Smith, one which goes some of the way to explaining why a walk round his shop on Low Pavement is so much more than an encounter with fashions which don’t suit me.
What is the phrase? Don’t look it up on the interweb – that’s a cop-out. Go into Waterstones and ask for his biography. It’s on the cover of a book that’s well worth reading.