School Gate blog: author Joe Craig asks why secondary schools destroy creativity

One of my most triumphant moments as a parent came in my local library. A daughter – I’m a father of seven – had taken it upon herself to read The Gruffalo to a sibling. She got louder and more expressive until every head in the place was turned towards her. People were on tiptoe peeping over shelves. Strangers’ children gathered at her feet and, when she finished, clamoured for her to read more.

Why did it feel so different from the torture of “round the class” reading when I was at school? Because it was done for fun and not for marks. Unesco, the United Nations educational and cultural arm, has produced a report which shows that reading for pleasure is the single best indicator of social mobility. People who can lose themselves in a book do better than those who can’t. Simple as that. Everyone wants the best for their children. Parents go private, hire tutors, even move house for educational edge. But the most effective thing you can do is share the pleasure of reading with them. Take them to the library.

So why are we allowing schools and local authorities to close down libraries? The Wirral, for instance, is thinking of closing 15 out of 24, creating a community in which it will probably be easier for a teenager to buy a wrap of heroin than borrow a book.

Why is it that 92% of our secondary schools spend below the minimum on books recommended by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals? Niney-two per cent! Irene Chant, head of the school library service in Somerset, has seen her budget drop from £4 a student in 2004 to £2 today. Schools are not only not buying books, they’re chucking them out to make room for computers to convert libraries into learning resource centres (LRCs).

The LRC is an educational disaster. Here, where books are merely “learning resources”, reading is about functional literacy instead of pleasure. A paperclip is a learning resource. Google Earth is a learning resource. But a book is “the distilled essence of a human soul”. A book is something you take to bed with you. It is not a learning resource any more than a kiss is a coordinated interpersonal labial spasm.

Yes, IT skills are important. But the library is not the place to learn them. And the book budget is not the way to fund them. At the end of one school visit recently, a young, idealistic head proudly showed me the new LRC with its bank of “state-of-the-art computers”.

Sadly, the day before, I’d seen the first of the Indian government’s proposed laptop computers that cost and weigh next to nothing. Next to them his pricey computers looked like a row of rusty gasometers. Even if the Indian laptops don’t catch on, school computers will still look clunky in two years and medieval in four. So why are we chucking so much at a system with such a short shelf-life, when we could be buying the content in a form that ages well, never crashes and can be taken everywhere, for next to nothing?

“But we have to prepare our children for the digital age,” said the head. Really? Do we? Have you ever said, “How can we encourage our boys to spend more time on the computers?” Or, “How we can empower our girls to upload more pictures to Facebook?” Shouldn’t we be teaching them something they don’t know? As my daughter pointed out, more or less all the children in her school have computers at home. Only a tiny number have books in any volume. Shouldn’t we be giving them something they don’t have?

There’s a feeling that books somehow “can’t compete” with computer games. Well, yes they can. I’ve done readings all over the country – frequently to huge crowds of discontented and distracted teenagers. Read them something funny for 10 minutes and they are yours. Obviously it’s not always that easy when they get older. I can’t read bedtime stories to my teens – they go to bed later than I do for a start – but I still make a point of reading out the good bits of new books and of leaving books in the loo with the funny bits marked.

There were times when I abhorred my teenagers’ taste in music, clothes and comedy, but our shared interest in books meant we always had some common ground. When my son went to work in a poor part of Peru, he gave me a list of all the books he had taken. I “shadowed” him. For a year we barely spoke, but I always felt close to him because we were both working our way through big fat Russian books.

A while ago I was working on a film project about ethnic cleansing. I met a girl who had been taken prisoner when still a baby and brought up in a regimented institution. She’d been starved of all warmth yet she was personable and articulate.

I said to her, “You were in the home from a very young age. How did you know this wasn’t normal? How did you know it wasn’t right?”

She said – and this is the sentence that made me want to be a children’s writer – “Books. I read Heidi.”

Millions, by Frank Cottrell Boyce, is one of 170 titles in the first phase of our Books for Schools scheme. Collect four tokens every week until the end of next month in The Sunday Times, see page 13, and more tokens every day in The Times. For details of how you can use these tokens to help to boost the stock of libary books at any of the 11,700 UK schools taking part in the scheme go to www.freebooksforschools.co.uk

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