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Good Morning Secondary School pupils should be encouraged to push themselves to read more difficult books to avoid a further slide in literacy levels. Data from a sample of just under 1 million pupils published by Professor Keith Topping of the University of Dundee suggests that by the time they take their GCSE’s many will have a reading age of 13 or less. In many respects, those of us who are parents, teachers or who work with teenagers won’t be surprised by these statistics. For a start, we know that many digital children are often too attached from an early age to their various devices and that reading a serious book can too easily be seen as something their parents, or even grandparents, might do. But Professor Topping suggests that we need to find subtle ways of voluntarily encouraging teenagers to read more serious works including, no doubt, great classics such as ��ѿ��ýr and Shakespeare. For these, and many great contemporary literary masterpieces, help young people more easily to understand ideas, concepts and the world in which they live. The Hebrew verb “to know” – yada- is one of the most often-used in the whole of Old Testament literature. And I was taught, early on, that it encapsulates and incorporates the deeply theological notion that knowledge is much more than merely stored information – to be accessed for an exam or crossword puzzle. Rather, to really know something, means to fathom it and to grasp the nettle of the context of it; to really begin see and to understand: that wonderful, dawning, moment when knowledge leads to understanding providing a framework to make choices and live? It always make me smile when, in the New Testament, St Paul’s becomes really annoyed at the ignorance of the early Christians at Corinth: “Don’t you know?” he exclaims, almost angrily, several times. Before concluding “no you don’t [understand]...you just don’t get it but he really wants them to understand because by grasping the deeper mystery of knowledge enlightenment results and the mystery of life is, in part, explained. Like St Paul. we might be similarly frustrated that one of the many casualties for a digital generation is a lack of meaningful engagement with serious books. Because this is not just about an aversion to reading great works of literature but about them being able to rationalise great matters of importance and thus providing a satisfactory framework for life and for living.