Taki's Mag

The Briterati, as I call Britain’s media pontificators on matters spiritual and temporal, are in a spin over reports that parents no longer read to their children and that the state is failing to protect the wee ’uns from pornography. It is good to drop in on Britain from time to time, if only to observe moral guardians’ ephemeral preoccupations in the columns of newspapers that fewer and fewer people bother to read.

Last time I was here, columnists were obsessing over who would design Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. All that is forgotten as the press ferrets out other tidbits to digest and regurgitate.

This week, it’s the kids. A study by the National Literacy Trust claimed that 25 percent of twelve-year-olds could not spell, that one in six Londoners cannot read without difficulty, and that most London employers have trouble finding literate employees. Apparently, only two-thirds of families with children keep books at home. Almost all of them, though, have computer games. This is not a happy picture for a country where the printing press made Milton and Dickens available to the masses.

The Evening Standard weighed in with a campaign to encourage parents to read to their children, something that it believes few of them do anymore. The paper also called for volunteers to read to children whose parents lack the inclination, ability, or time to do it themselves. Even Camilla, the future queen, took up the call. Ideally, Mom or Dad should put the kids to bed while telling stories or reading Beatrix Potter or Tintin. If they don’t, the volunteers plan to pick up the slack. How long this will last or whether it will increase literacy is anyone’s guess.

Regarding children’s access to pornography, the columnists have suggested remedies that fall short of interfering with Rupert Murdoch’s satellite channels’ habit of offering hardcore samplers for free without asking for proof of age. Short of bringing the police into the house, I’m not sure how you can stop it. When I was about nine, we used to sneak looks at naturist magazines in bookshops. Young autodidacts will explore all that their elders want to keep to themselves. So let the elders read to them and ask the cops to put a wall between youngsters and whatever Murdoch puts on his porn channels.

The real place to help children is not the living-room sofa, with its omnipresent television, nor the bedroom with a conscientious parent reading Harry (rather than Beatrix) Potter aloud. It is the dining room. Civilization begins at the dinner table. Here is where we learn the rudiments of good behavior. Observation tells us which knives and forks to use and not to throw food on the floor. We learn as well the ingredients that go into a decent lunch or dinner, about nutrition and taste, what goes with what, and what to avoid. We learn how to drink wine to accompany food rather than to get blasted. We come to understand the art of conversation, when to speak, when to listen, when to assent, and when to argue.

At the table, we consume and we give back. To do that, we have to arrive having read and thought about books to discuss. We need to understand what is happening in the world enough to speak up. When someone mentions the latest production of a Pinter play, we learn that as civilized creatures we should find out about it ourselves for the next conversation. At the dinner table, we receive and share knowledge, opinion, banter, gossip, jokes, and affection. We test our ideas against those of others. We challenge our elders. They challenge us. We learn to come armed with something in our heads before we fill our stomachs.

The sadness for children in the English-speaking world is that most of them no longer have lunch or dinner with their families. Statistics vary wildly, depending on who has done the research. But most indications are that American and British families are eating dinner together less and less. Many of those who do have dinner together do so before a television, barely noticing that young Timmy is drooling into his just-unfrozen pizza or little Sally is eating her macaroni with her fingers.

Read to your kids as often as you can. It’s better than downing a beer in front of the television. Try to shield them from elephantine organs pumping away at shaved pudenda. But go the extra mile. Sit down at the table and talk to them as equals. Let them help with the cooking, as no youngster loses from knowing how to prepare good food, where the food comes from, and what it costs. Make them part of civilization and not isolated, disaffected sociopaths seeking companionship in artificial friendships within their computers’ illusory worlds. Let them grow into people able to hold their own in conversation anywhere, willing to debate their supposed betters and unafraid to tell employers, politicians, and experts when they are wrong. In short, let them be human.

As the blessed Oscar Wilde said, “The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.”