Why we need to open that book now

A group of teenagers spray-painted a historically black school with racist and anti-Semitic messages recently in Virginia. The judge, as reported by the Huffington Post on February 7, 2017, served the young men an unusual punishment: writing reports on a list of books and movies, besides also visiting a Holocaust museum and doing research on the swastika. Among the books they have to read are To Kill A Mockingbird, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Native Son, all of which map the struggles of marginalised and repressed lives. 

Reading is often thought of as a form of escapism – an act that allows us to delve into triumphs and pitfalls within a book's pages, and shun out our own. But here's the flipside: it starts with a person who, a few years ago, felt the need to convey a message to the world. The person spent about twelve hours thinking about the complexities of what they had to say. They drove people mad asking about their lives and experiences; drove themselves mad with endlessly meticulous research. They spent months of going through archives, news reports, films, music, and hours of bringing to life each perfect word followed by another. A week later, they rewrote the whole thing. And after many repetitions of the same cycle, after evolving further in the hands of a host of editors and designers, a book was born. 

Imagine absorbing all of that hard work, experience, and innate knowledge by simply reading what the pages have to say. 

"The government and schools must give greater attention to promoting literature and the arts, not by forcing students to memorise works of fiction like much else that they learn in school but by teaching them to fall in love with them.

An article on The Guardian talks about the research carried out by psychologists at The New School for Social Research in New York. They tested 1,000 participants with the Theory of Mind technique – a cognitive science practice that uses a person's mental states, beliefs, and opinions to predict his/her actions. The study revealed that reading literary fiction enhances empathy in readers and allows them to better identify others' sentiments. David Comer Kidd, one of the psychologists behind the experiment, explained how the incompleteness of characters in well-crafted literary works helps readers to formulate those characters individually, making the experience their own. Given that the same psychological processes are involved in navigating through real life situations, Kidd explained that, "Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experiment. It is a social experience. [It] lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way."

Philip Davies, a professor of psychology at Liverpool University who countered Kidd's methods through his own experiment, added that experiencing a novel also teaches a person not to judge. 

Bangladesh has seen a significant rise in literacy rates over the past decade. World Bank figures reveal a rise in net enrolment rates at the primary school level to up to 98 percent in 2015, with secondary school net enrolment rates at 54 percent. As of October 2016, 61.5 percent of the population above 15 years of age could read and write, with a school life expectancy of 10 years, according to the CIA World Factbook. And yet, over 87 million of our workforce was reported to be undereducated, with only 25 to 44 percent of school students possessing fluent language and numerical skills. It must be noted that such large numbers of people unable to read and write fluently, let alone engage in creative practices, foreshadow a higher number of dropouts in the future, and hence a less efficient workforce. 

The government, with the help of NGOs and educational experts, is showing significant efforts towards tackling these learning deficiencies in our country. However, merely teaching them to recognise letters and numbers and sign their own name is nowhere near enough to ensure that a bursting young population can think for themselves. While the recent discrepancies in textbooks is an alarming indicator of the kind of substandard education being fed to the next generation, it is equally frustrating to note how rigid some portions of the student body have become in their rejection of creativity and intellect. 

In 2015, public school examination candidates were wrongfully humiliated in the media for their dearth of general knowledge. While we must keep in mind the immense mental pressure they must have been under while being charged on national television, it was nevertheless disappointing that almost none of them could attest to a habit of reading for pleasure. The one student who claimed that she likes reading Tagore couldn't even name one story written by him. Towards the end of 2016, the introduction of creative questions in public examinations brought about a wave of protest from students who refused to accept the change. This newspaper received several letters complaining about the policy as an injustice dealt against them; some even compared it to the language movement and the war of independence, reiterating how Bangladesh's student body is always prepared to rise up against what is wrong. What direction are we headed towards if we think of creativity as an affront?

Most of the issues at the forefront right now, be it xenophobia, bigotry, youth violence, child marriage, or the alarming spike in murder and rape, can be traced back to an apparent lack of empathy and intellect in our midst. If we want to truly tackle these issues and help drive our country towards the sustainable development goals at the forefront of public discussion, the efforts must start at the roots. 

The government and schools must give greater attention to promoting literature and the arts, not by forcing students to memorise works of fiction like much else that they learn in school but by teaching them to fall in love with them. Parents should read to their children, and instil in them the curiosity to explore not only the monuments around the globe, but also the spectrum of human emotions. Meanwhile, it is up to the media to inform the masses of the literary and creative options available to interested readers, as well as the benefits of the act itself. We need more reviews, more features of literary works, and heartier and more accessible public discourse regarding these matters. It is only by creating better and more intelligent human beings at every level of the society that we can build a more efficient workforce, as well as better leaders. 

It was the week before my final exams that I had read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, one of the books the boys in Virginia have been sentenced to read. It doesn't speak too well of me as a student, but I put off revising the syllabus to finish the last few chapters of the book in frenzy. I remember being blown away by the kindness of a white man braving social persecution to protect a black man wrongfully accused of rape. It was also the book that inspired me to pursue a minor in English, a decision that changed my life and helped put me in the rooms of The Daily Star, writing this article today. If the young minds around us can learn to appreciate a fraction of the marvels made possible by literature, this country will be headed towards far greater heights than we can imagine. 

The writer is a student of English and Economics at NSU, and a member of the Editorial team, The Daily Star.