A recent editorial offers a timely defence of something simple yet increasingly rare: children deeply absorbed in books. Simon Haines describes reading as an “alternative reality”, one that cultivates attention, imagination, and the ability to grapple with human complexity. This, he argues, is not just an educational skill but a moral one the groundwork for a lifetime of reflective thought.
Yet the piece is more than an ode to childhood classics. It is a pointed challenge to contemporary academic gatekeeping, where literature is often judged by whether it meets approved positions on race, gender, class, or power. Against this narrow doctrinal lens, Haines mounts a defence of the Western canon as a rich inheritance of art, philosophy, and storytelling that has shaped generations of minds.
His perspective is informed by experience. As founding CEO of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, Haines saw how controversial such traditions have become within universities. While Ramsay programs now operate at ACU and the universities of Queensland and Wollongong, early proposals faced intense ideological resistance.
Today, Haines sees a similar impulse in the way classic children’s books from Kipling’s Jungle Book to Turner’s Seven Little Australians are dismissed for failing presentday moral tests. Such judgments, he warns, reduce literature to ideology and people to categories. A better measure is simpler: does a book enlarge a young reader’s inner life?
This case matters at a moment when humanities enrolments are falling and attention is increasingly fragmented by digital noise. Books, Haines writes, remain “permanent structures of thought”, becoming more real as generations inhabit them. If we want this cultural inheritance to endure, the solution begins early: place good books in children’s hands, and trust that once they discover the joy of reading, they will keep going.