Thrillers should be on UK school curriculum to boost reading, says Lee Child | Schools
One of the world’s best-selling authors has argued that too much literature taught in UK schools is keeping children from reading and thrillers should be part of the curriculum.
Lee Child, the British author of the Jack Reacher novels who have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, said: “Why, if you’re an English teacher, if you’ve been reading all your life, if you love that stuff and you’ve studied it at university, then you want to introduce the big, big masterpieces. But that’s too much for kids.”
He added that it’s an even bigger problem because of social media: “Now everything is so fragmented and so urgent and so breathtaking, when do you find the time to sit down and read?”
He also argued that thrillers should be included in the curriculum and school libraries. He said: “You should have whatever is interesting and gets people into the habit of reading. Then of course you can have the fancy stuff later, but don’t start with that.”
The boy was speaking at HMP Doncaster, a category B prison, when he held literacy sessions with inmates in a program he said he hoped would become a national programme. He said many of them stopped studying at school.
This was his third visit to Doncaster and the boys impressed during the sessions. Each was encouraged to write, and Child listened to how the process was going and provided constructive feedback.
He told the men to write about themselves. “My books are about Jack Reacher, but they’re really about me,” he said. “This is what I want to be, this is what I want to do, this is how I would live if I could.”
Speaking later, Child said prisoners were often people who had been “exposed to great works of literature” during their formal education, and that everyone stood to benefit from these sessions.
He added: “Ideally, what we wanted to do was make everyone’s day a little bit easier in the prison world. Anecdotally, we hear that if they’re reading or writing all day, then the atmosphere is a lot calmer, a lot more relaxed, and everyone has a happier time.”
Child said he believes improving literacy skills will help reduce recidivism rates. “I actually think what every person in Britain wants is a safer society,” he said. “They want less crime, more safety around them, wherever they are. That’s what started it. How do you do that?”
Child, who moved from the USA to England after Donald Trump’s re-election, also emphasized that the project is not about being soft on crime. “I am not a soft-hearted person,” he said. “I’m not a do-gooder. I’m a completely practical person, and this is a completely practical thing.”
John Butler, one of the prisoners who attended the sessions, said that he enjoyed the sessions and wrote notes on the back. He said that as a young man he got in trouble in school for not learning.
Child prepared the plan for the literacy sessions with Colne Valley Labor MP Paul Davies. Together they presented the matter directly to prisons minister James Timpson.
They have been to five prisons so far and Davies has also hosted democracy sessions. “The proposal is to go up to 20 and then create a regional model,” Davies said. “Lee will be involved, of course, but he will also be working with many other important writers. The idea is that someone like Lee is a catalyst. He inspires people.”
Jake Richards, the justice minister with responsibility for sentencing, also attended the boy’s hearings. “Sometimes we forget while sitting in the Ministry of Justice [Ministry of Justice] and when we look at the prison numbers, we see that behind each number there is a person who has committed a crime and is serving his sentence; it’s true, but it also has a real vulnerability and a story,” Richards said.
“It is a huge challenge to see what we can do to ensure that these individuals have the skills and confidence to contribute when they leave here and that they do not return to a life of crime and we have much more work to do.”
