Rachael’s blog – The right to a name and language

“Have we lost the ability to wallow in the sheer, primitive, childlike delight of utterly absorbing reading? The sort of reading that makes you forget to eat (like a child racing through the latest Harry Potter), or blot out the screams and splashes from the swimming pool on holiday?”

A question asked by Valerie Sanders in her lovely review (in the Times Higher Education) of a new book by (American) Professor of English Alan Jacobs: “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction”.

This caught my eye because of the recent news story about some children in the UK who start school or nursery not knowing what their names are or even that they have a name.

This is the extreme tip of an iceberg. There are many more children being held back because they struggle to communicate with others or understand them.

Apparently there are 1.2 million children in this country with identified and long term speech and language needs, but there are also too many with “socially determined” communication problems. These include poor, or non-existent family communication, plus the distractions of DVDs, the internet, the TV and mobile phones.

I agree with Michael Gove’s emphasis on communication and language in the new curriculum for younger children. But how do we make it a joy, a pleasure – not a chore or a distraction?

The pleasure of reading has to be an answer, and one in which parents (and relatives), teachers and children share.

Professor Jacobs’ book is about recapturing the “knack of deep concentration, that sense of being ‘rapt’ by reading that, in our multitasking and harried adulthood, has …..become a lost art or, worse, an irrecoverable satisfaction.”

If we no longer have time for, and pleasure in, reading – what chance do our children have?

It’s shocking to think of a child in the UK arriving at school not knowing their name, not having the pleasure, or challenge, of spelling it out and knowing who they are. In many ways it says more about the consequences of “harried” adulthood than a child’s inability or desire to communicate.

My friends in teaching tell me there are many worse problems for teachers and children to deal with in schools today. I accept that.

But how can a child express how they feel without words. They have a right to a name that they can at least spell. Communication skills, as one head teacher said last week, are the foundations on which learning – and literacy – are built.

“This is the Holy Grail of breaking barriers of under achievement and disaffection.”