For the last two decades, I have stood in front of thousands of students year after year - young, blissfully unaware, phone-in-hand, permanently connected to everything except themselves. And for long now I have wanted to share something that has been keeping me up at night: These children do not read. 

I do not mean they struggle with reading. I mean they have chosen, freely and without guilt, to live their entire lives without books. Not without prescribed texts — those they reluctantly skim before examinations. I mean without a single book read out of curiosity or fascination. Or out of the simple, irreplaceable desire to know.

A few days ago I asked a group of my students — not freshers, mind you, but students well into their academic years — “whether they had ever read anything beyond what the syllabus demanded?” The room went quiet. Then came the confessions, one after another, almost cheerful in their casualness. No. Never. Not really.

I drove home that evening utterly disappointed.

There is a recurring narrative we keep telling ourselves about this generation. That they are informed. That they are aware. That they have access to more knowledge than any human beings who ever lived before them. Being close to these kids, I refuse to believe this story anymore.

Knowing in passing about the Holocaust is not the same as reading Man’s Search For Meaning and being wrecked by it. Understanding Newtonian Physics but having never read about William Blake’s Four Fold Vision is a pity. Knowing that Kafka wrote about alienation is not the same as reading The Metamorphosis alone at night and suddenly relating with it with a cold, uncomfortable shock. That shock, that moment of recognition is the whole point.. But we are cheerfully and casually throwing it away.

Information tells you what happened. A book makes you feel the weight of it which no sixty-second video can substitute. And anyone who tells you otherwise has simply never read a great book and does not know what they are missing.

Every educator is worried about the same issue. Students who cannot hold a conversation. Students who cannot construct........

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