Reading and Prohibition
It is very generally recognised that reading may be harmful as well as beneficial—that while good literature may be good for the young, bad literature may have a "demoralising" effect. This apprehension is common among parents and teachers, but their view of the matter is not always a clear one: the prevailing rules of law, whether public or private, are not based upon scientific principles, they aim at the preservation of discipline and the avoidance of discomfort rather than at the guidance of the young reader through the period of rapid and inevitable growth. Moreover, the elements of the problem are not understood, and two very different dangers are confused together.
The deliberation, to begin with, must take account of a difference between two kinds of experience, one bringing us into contact with facts, the other with the human mind. The experience we gain may be information-experience or character-experience. The latter of these is by far the more potent for good or ill, yet it is the former which the pastors and masters of childhood often regard with greater apprehension. Their fears are neither unnatural nor absurd. Children are born with an appetite for information, but, like their appetite for food, it may be healthy without being well regulated. An exclusive diet of adventures, as of apples, may be innutritious: with passions, as with wine, familiarity may come too soon, that is before the complete and sane knowledge of maturity is possible; but these risks have probably been much exaggerated and the precautions taken against them are always being defeated by the natural curiosity of youth. The desire of young people to discover all that can be discovered about sensations cannot be effectively repressed, it can only be prevented from becoming an obsession by leaving open the way of exploration, and by taking care at the same time that the discoveries shall be made under the guidance of right reason and right feeling. …
It is not information, then, which is to be feared, but the character-experience which accompanies it, and the question becomes one of still greater importance when we remember that in anything which is not a mere colourless record there is imparted to the reader either an idea, or a movement of the mind favourable to an idea. … Any written words, whether in books or periodicals, which are the result of a formative process in the mind of the writer, must make in their own degree a formative impression upon the mind of the reader. If the reader's mind is the stronger the impression will be slight, or very possibly negligible, but if the tablet to be impressed is soft and still undinted the mark made will be proportionately deeper and more lasting. And what is most important here is not merely the depth, but the outline or style of the impression. For an example, we may contrast the picture of human life as drawn by Tolstoy or Hardy in any of their novels with the trivial realism, equally removed from feeling and reflection, of the domestic scenes in the ephemeral novels which fill the bookshops to-day.
These books, whether sensational or sentimental, and whether feebly or crudely written, are generally regarded as harmless because they do not offend against the rule of propriety, but to admit or favour them and at the same time to exclude the work of greater writers is a reductio ad absurdum of the principle of condemnation and avoidance: it is to entrust the care of youth to lower minds and to bar them from intercourse with those whose view of life is deepest and most virile. It is, moreover, a mere postponement of the inevitable, and in the meantime it sets up a false standard which ends by making freedom, when it comes, a misunderstood and furtive privilege. This is too high a price to pay for the avoidance of uncomfortable questions and possible aberrations from discipline.
Prohibition, then, is both futile and undesirable: but it does not follow that there is no remedy against the debilitating effect of vulgarity in print. Mental, like physical, contagion is best avoided by maintaining a vigorous health. The risk cannot be escaped, but it can be forestalled.
Adapted from The Teaching of English in England, Report of the Departmental Committee appointed by the President of the Board of Education (the Newbolt Report), HMSO, 1921.