The Poverty of Imagination: On Pakistan's unending economic crisis

 

Highly structured coaching dehumanises cricket

Greg Chappell in Cricinfo

 
I believe that cricket coaches should have an oath not dissimilar to that laid down by Hippocrates in Of the Epidemics: "first do no harm".

At a time when the head coaching role with Australian cricket is in the spotlight, it is worth looking at the role of coaching in the game more broadly.

The developed cricket countries have lost the natural environments that were a big part of their development structure in bygone eras. In those environments, young cricketers learned from watching good players and then emulating them in pick-up matches with family and friends.

Usually any instruction that was received was rudimentary, and interference from adults generally was minimal. In these unstructured settings, players developed a natural style while learning to compete against older players, during which they learned critical coping and survival skills.

The Indian subcontinent still has many towns where coaching facilities are rare and youngsters play in streets and on vacant land without the interference of formal coaching. This is where many of their current stars have learned the game.

MS Dhoni, with whom I worked in India, is a good example of a batter who developed his talent and learned to play in this fashion. By competing against more experienced individuals on a variety of surfaces early in his development, Dhoni developed the decision-making and strategic skills that have set him apart from many of his peers. His is one of the sharpest cricket minds I have encountered.

England, on the other hand, have very few of these natural environments and their players are produced in a narrow band of public schools, with an emphasis on the coaching manual. This is why their batting has lost much of its flair and resilience.

The games that young people make up and play are dynamic and foster creativity, joy, flexibility in technical execution, tactical understanding and decision-making, which are often missing in batting at the highest levels.

Invariably, when an adult gets involved with kids playing cricket, they break up the game and kill its energy by emphasising correct technique. This reduces a dynamic, engaging environment that promotes learning to a flat and lifeless set of drills that do little to improve batting in games.

The growth in structured training in the preparation of batters has not only failed to take batting forward, it has actually resulted in a decline in batting. Highly structured environments, and an excessive focus on teaching players to perform "correct" technique, dehumanise cricket.

The environments that attempt to reduce batting to mastery of technique, and to break it up into a number of distinct components, reflect a misunderstanding of how complex batting is. Quality batting requires good imagination, creativity, and the ability to identify and respond to challenges in matches.

In response to this problem, we must change the education of coaches. From training them to be the font of all wisdom, we must instead enable them to become managers of creative learning environments in which young cricketers learn the game with minimal invasion and interference from adults.

In this approach the coaches' work involves setting up conditions for learning through engagement with the physical learning environment - which involves some degree of awareness and decision-making.

There are a couple of significant challenges to the status quo of coaching involved here. One is the shift from the idea of the coach as having all the knowledge that he hands down to the players as passive receivers, to one of the coach facilitating and guiding players in constructing their own knowledge as active learners.

I can hear those who believe batting is all about technique asking how these "free-range" cricketers will become technically adept, but I would remind them that for the first 100 years of Test cricket, that is how the very best were bred.

In his wonderful book The Art of Cricket published 64 years ago, Don Bradman wrote: "I would prefer to tell a young player what to do than how to do it." I would take this further by suggesting that good coaches should also help them learn when and why.


The author with MS Dhoni in 2006, whom he describes as "one of the sharpest cricket minds I have encountered" Dibyangshu Sarkar / AFP/Getty Images

Training must be focused on improving game play by locating learning in contexts that, to different degrees, replicate game conditions, so that improvements in practice sessions lead to improvements in matches.

This does not mean just playing cricket instead of practising. It means designing and managing modified games and activities aimed at particular outcomes that suit the skills, attitudes and motivations of the players and the preferred learning outcomes - whether for children learning to play or for batters at the highest levels.

The best coaches ask questions to get players thinking and working together to solve problems. The questions are aimed at drawing players out to come up with solutions to the problems presented to them.This does not neglect technique but, instead, develops it by having players learn and improve the execution of technique in the context of a match. This develops decision-making, flexibility of execution, awareness, and the ability to adapt to the range of challenges that batters face.

The greatest batters developed their talent over long periods of time by playing and learning in creative, informal learning environments from young ages without an excessive focus on perfecting someone else's idea of what an ideal technique should look like.

England would do well to look at their coaching methods and how the best batters develop their skills as part of any review that they initiate on the back of another resounding defeat in Australia. The England batting was bereft of class, short on imagination, and lacked resilience throughout this tour. If I was in charge of English cricket, I know what I would do first - but I won't be giving that information away for free!

If they don't do something drastic, they will be accused of behaving as in the aphorism that has often been misattributed to Albert Einstein: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it": Einstein quotes

 

Emotions trigger the imagination: How to dispute irrational beliefs without breaking rapport

 

To Save Western Capitalism - Look East

The East could have something to offer the mighty West, where we are seeing glimpses into capitalism's true nature. Antara Haldar (The Independent) on the rise and fall of civilisation as we know it

 

Photos Getty


Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a place where peace and prosperity reigned. Let’s call this place the West. These lands had once been ravaged by bloody wars but its rulers had, since, solved the puzzle of perpetual progress and discovered a kind of political and economic elixir of life. Big Problems were relegated to either Somewhere Else (the East) or Another Time (History). The Westerners dutifully sent emissaries far and wide to spread the word that the secret of eternal bliss had been found –and were, themselves, to live happily ever after.

So ran, until very recently, the story of how the West was won.

The formula that had been discovered was simple: the recipe for a bright, shiny new brand of global capitalism based on liberal democracy and something called neoclassical economics. But it was different from previous eras – cleansed of Dickensian grime. The period after the two world wars was in many a Golden Age: the moment of Bretton Woods (that established the international monetary and financial order) and the Beveridge report (the blueprint for the welfare state), feminism and free love.

It was post-colonial, post-racial, post-gendered. It felt like you could have it all, material abundance and the moral revolutions; a world infinitely vulnerable to invention – but all without picking sides, all based on institutional equality of access. That’s how clever the scheme was – truly a brave new world. Fascism and class, slavery and genocide – no one doubted that, in the main, it had been left behind (or at least that we could all agree on its evils); that the wheels of history had permanently been set in motion to propel us towards a better future. The end of history, Francis Fukuyama called it – the zenith of human civilisation. 

Austerity in Athens: the eurozone crisis hit Greece not once but twice (Getty)

While liberal democracy was the part of the programme that got slapped on to the brochure, it was a streamlined paradigm of neoclassical economics that provided the brains behind the enterprise. Neoclassical economics, scarred by war-era ideological acrimony, scrubbed the subject of all the messy stuff: politics, values – all the fluff. To do so it used a new secret weapon: quantitative precision unprecedented in the social sciences.

It didn’t rest on whimsical things like enlightened leadership or invested citizenship or compassionate communities. No, siree. It was pure science: a reliable, universally-applicable maximising equation for society (largely stripped of any contextual or, until recently, even cognitive considerations). Its particular magic trick was to be able to do good without requiring anyone to be good.

And, it was limitless in its capacity to turn boundless individual rationality into endless material wellbeing, to cull out of infinite resources (on a global scale) indefinite global growth. It presumed to definitively replace faltering human touch with the infallible “invisible hand” and, so, discourses of exploitation with those of merit.

When I started as a graduate student in the early 2000s, this model was at the peak of its powers: organised into an intellectual and policy assembly line that more or less ran the world. At the heart of this enterprise, in the unipolar post-Cold War order, was what was known as the Chicago school of law and economics. The Chicago school boiled the message of neoclassical economics down to a simpler formula still: the American Dream available for export – just add private property and enforceable contracts. Anointed with a record number of Nobel prizes, its message went straight to the heart of Washington DC, and from there – via its apostles, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank radiated out to the rest of the globe. 

It was like the social equivalent of the Genome project. Sure the model required the odd tweak, the ironing out of the occasional glitch but, for the most part, the code had been cracked. So, like the ladies who lunch, scholarly attention in the West turned increasingly to good works and the fates of “the other” – spatially and temporally.

One strain led to a thriving industry in development: these were the glory days of tough love, and loan conditionalities. The message was clear: if you want Western-style growth, get with the programme. The polite term for it was structural adjustment and good governance: a strict regime of purging what Max Weber had called mysticism and magic, and swapping it for muscular modernisation. Titles like Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else jostled for space on shelves of bookstores and best-seller lists.

Another led to esoteric islands of scholarship devoted to atonement for past sins. On the US side of the Atlantic, post-colonial scholarship gained a foothold, even if somewhat limp. In America, slavery has been, for a while now, the issue a la mode. A group of Harvard scholars has been taking a keen interest in the “history of capitalism”.

Playing intellectual archaeologists, they’ve excavated the road that led to today’s age of plenty – leaving in its tracks a blood-drenched path of genocide, conquest, and slavery. The interest that this has garnered, for instance Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, is heartening, but it has been limited to history (or worse still, “area studies”) departments rather than economics, and focused on the past not the present. 

As far back as the fifties ... the economy was driving the society, when it should have been the other way around (Getty)

Indeed, from the perspective of Western scholarship, the epistemic approach to the amalgam of these instances has been singularly inspired by Indiana Jones – dismissed either as curious empirical aberrations or distanced by the buffer of history. By no means the stuff of mainstream economic theory.

Some of us weakly cleared our throats and tried to politely intercede that there were, all around us, petri dishes of living, breathing data on not just development – but capitalism itself. Maybe, just maybe – could it be? – that if the template failed to work in a large majority of cases around the globe that there may be a slight design error. 

My longtime co-author, Nobel Prize winner in Economics and outspoken critic, Joseph Stiglitz, in his 1990 classic Globalisation and Its Discontents chronicled any number of cases of leaching-like brutality of structural adjustment. The best-selling author and my colleague at Cambridge, Ha-Joon Chang, in Kicking Away the Ladder, pointed out that it was a possibility that the West was misremembering the trajectory of its own ascent to power – that perhaps it was just a smidgen more fraught than it remembered, that maybe the State had had a somewhat more active part to play before it retired from the stage.

But a bright red line separated the “us” from the “them” enforcing a system of strict epistemic apartheid. Indeed, as economics retreated further and further into its silo of smugness, economics departments largely stopped teaching economic history or sociology and development economics clung on by operating firmly within the discipline-approved methodology.

So far, so good – a bit like the last night of merriment on the Titanic. Then the iceberg hit.

Suddenly the narratives that were comfortably to do with the there and then became for the Western world a matter of the here and now.

In the last 10 years, what economic historian Robert Skidelsky recently referred to as the “lost decade” for the advanced industrial West, problems that were considered the exclusive preserve of development theory – declining growth, rampant inequality, failing institutions, a fractured political consensus, corruption, mass protests and poverty – started to be experienced on home turf.

The Great Recession starting 2008 should really have been the first hint: foreclosures and evictions, bankruptcies and bailouts, crashed stock markets. Then came the eurozone crisis starting in 2009 (first Greece; then Ireland; then Portugal; then Spain; then Cyprus; oh, and then Greece, again). But after an initial scare, it was largely business as usual – written off as an inevitable blip in the boom-bust logic of capitalist cycles. It was 2016, the year the world went mad, that made the writing on the wall impossible to turn away from – starting with the shock Brexit vote, and then the Trump election. Not everyone understands what a CDO (collateralised debt obligation) is, but the vulgarity of a leader of the free world who governs by tweet and “grabs pussy” is hard to miss.

So how did it happen, this unexpected epilogue to the end of history?

I hate to say I told you so, but some of us had seen this coming – the twist in the tale, foreshadowed by an eerie background score lurking behind the clinking of champagne glasses. Even at the height of the glory days. In the summer before the fall of Lehman Brothers, a group of us “heterodox economists” had gathered at a summer school in the North of England. We felt like the audience at a horror movie – knowing that the gory climax was moments away while the victim remained blissfully impervious.

The plot wasn’t just predictable, it was in the script for anyone to see. You just had to look closely at the fine print.

In particular, you needed to have read your Karl Polanyi, the economic sociologist, who predicted this crisis over 50 years ago. As far back as 1954, The Great Transformation diagnosed the central perversion of the capitalist system, the inversion that makes the person less important than the thing – the economy driving society, rather than the other way around.

Polanyi’s point was simple: if you turned all the things that people hold sacred into grist to the mill of a large impersonal economic machinery (he called this disembedding) there would be a backlash. That the fate of a world where monopoly money reigns supreme and human players are reduced to chessmen at its mercy is doomed. The sociologist Fred Block compares this to the stretching of a giant elastic band – either it reverts to a more rooted position, or it snaps.

It is this tail-wagging-the-dog quality that is driving the current crisis of capitalism. It’s a matter of existential alienation. This problem of artificial abstraction runs through the majority of upheavals of our age – from the financial crisis to Facebook. So cold were the nights in this era of enforced neutrality that the torrid affair between liberal democracy and neoclassical economics resulted in the most surprising love child – populism.

The simple fact is that after decades on promises not delivered on, the system had written just one too many cheques that couldn’t be cashed. And people had had just about enough.

 

The Brexit vote in 2016 followed by the election of Trump ... and the world had finally gone mad (Getty)

The old fault lines of global capitalism, the East versus West dynamics of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round, turned out to be red herrings. The axis that counts is the system versus the little people. Indeed, the anatomies of annihilation look remarkably similar across the globe – whether it’s the loss of character of a Vanishing New York or Disappearing London, or threatened communities of farmers in India and fishermen in Greece.

Trump voters in the US, Brexiteers in Britain and Modi supporters in India seek identity – any identity, even a made-up call to arms to “return” to mythical past greatness in the face of the hollowing out of meaning of the past 70 years. The rise of populism is, in many ways, the death cry of populations on the verge of extinction – yearning for something to believe in when their gods have died young. It’s a problem of the 1 per cent – poised to control two-thirds of the world economy by 2030 – versus the 99 per cent. But far more pernicious is the Frankenstein’s monster that is the idea of an economic system that is an end in itself.

Not to be too much of a conspiracy theorist about it, but the current system doesn’t work because it wasn’t meant to – it was rigged from the start. Wealth was never actually going to “trickle down”. Thomas Piketty did the maths.

Suddenly, the alarmist calls of the developmentalists objecting to the systemic skews in the process of globalisation don’t seem quite so paranoid.

But this is more than “poco” (what the cool kids call postcolonialism) schadenfreude. My point is a serious one; although I would scarcely have dared articulate it before now. Could Kipling have been wrong, and might the East have something to offer the mighty West? Could the experiences of exotic lands point the way back to the future? Could it be, could it just, that it may even be a source of epistemic wisdom?

Behind the scaffolding of Xi Jinping’s China or Narendra Modi’s India, sites of capitalism under construction, we are offered a glimpse into the system’s true nature. It is not God-given, but the product of highly political choices. Just like Jane Jacobs protesting to save Washington Square Park or Beatrix Potter devoting the bulk of her royalty earnings to conserving the Lake District were choices. But these cases also show that trust and community are important. The incredible resilience of India’s jugaad economy, or the critical role of quanxi in the creation of the structures in what has been for the past decade the world’s fastest-growing nation, China. A little mysticism and magic may be just the thing.

The narrative that we need is less that of Frankenstein’s man-loses-control of monster, and more that of Pinocchio’s toy-becomes-real-boy-by-acquiring-conscience; less technology, and more teleology. The real limit may be our imaginations. Perhaps the challenge is to do for scholarship, what Black Panther has done for Hollywood. You never know. Might be a blockbuster.

Cricket - Moving past a howler

 

 Nicholas Hogg

Shane Warne drops Kevin Pietersen, and the 2005 Ashes  © Getty Images

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Last season I was bowling at a former England player - not a common occurrence, I can assure you - when he snicked a late outswinger to first slip. A photographer freeze-famed the moment: hands cupped, the ball about to be grasped. The photographer didn't catch the ricochet off his palms, the head-in-hands aftermath from bowler and fielder. No slip catch is easy, and I felt more sympathy than anger towards my team-mate. I knew that the drop would haunt us both, two amateurs missing a rare chance to bag an ex-international.

Momentary yet lasting, the howler is a lapse of batting, bowling or fielding - and we must add but discuss no further in fear of this article turning into a thesis, the umpire howler - a singular fail that can flush an entire game, or even a series, down the drain. But no one is perfect, and no player wins every battle. Here, NFL coaching icon Vince Lombardi encouragingly reminds us, "It's not whether you get knocked down but whether you get up." 

Or, if you're a gifted spin bowler, win the next series.

Just before lunch on the final day at The Oval in 2005, Kevin Pietersen edged Brett Lee to first slip. Pietersen was on 15. The catch, a ball that would be snapped up in practice, is shelled by no other than Shane Warne. Pietersen marched on to a grand total of 158 and claimed the Ashes, that mythical little urn that, along with the cricket ball, had just passed through Warne's hands.

And he was hardly the first to fail so spectacularly. In 1902, the moustachioed offspinner Fred Tate made his England debut at Old Trafford, a game that England had to win to keep the Ashes alive. When Joe Darling skied one to deep square leg, it was poor Fred who stuck out his hand and helped it to the ground. Darling's 20 more runs proved vital in a low-scoring game, a second innings in which Tate went in at No. 11 with England needing 8 to win.

Tate scored 4. He sobbed in the changing room and sobbed at the train station. Although his son Maurice would achieve England glory, his father ended his days a broken man, a publican who harangued his few customers with the tale of his infamous drop.

It may not have been a series-losing moment, but when Kings XI Punjab beat Royal Challengers Bangalore in Mohali this year, they had two players to thank: David Miller and his 38-ball century, and Virat Kohli for the top-edged skier he spilled. Victory burst through his hands, hit him in the mouth, and landed on the turf. Kohli deflected the press from his howler by saying, "It was one of the best innings that has ever been seen in the IPL." And if it helped him move on from the horror drop, then let him praise - it's better than crying all the way home, opening a pub, and then dying a pauper.

A player's conscience, whether he forgets or regrets, must affect recovery from grave mistakes. I wonder if Geoff Boycott spent sleepless nights ruing his dreadful run out of Nottingham favourite Derek Randall at Trent Bridge in 1977. As Randall trudges off the turf, Boycott covers his face with his gloves. In mock shame to appease the crowd or genuine grief, one must take his word. "I have never felt so completely wretched on a cricket field," he later wrote. And he did go on to make a ton, "the finest I have ever played", which in Boycott's world equals success, regardless of the result or run-out victim.

In a universe of infinite possibilities, Mark Ramprakash has tucked his bat under his arm, and we're leaping for joy

So, can we fully recover from a howler - without being a sociopath?

US comedian Larry David featured baseball player Bill Buckner in an episode of his hit series Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry, after losing a baseball game by letting the ball through his legs, befriends Buckner at a memorabilia signing - where Buckner, still reviled for a similar fielding error that cost the Boston Red Sox the 1986 World Series, is sitting alone. Larry and Buckner walk the New York streets as passers-by heckle and boo Buckner, mirroring the abuse and death threats he received in life after his costly fluff. But this is TV, and David has written a heroic part for Buckner - he catches a baby thrown from a burning building before the cheering crowd hoist him onto their shoulders.

This may be fiction, yet Buckner also found peace with his howler in reality. In 1990 he returned to a standing ovation from Red Sox fans, and has since formed a double act with Mookie Wilson, the player whose hit he missed.

These examples must be a lesson for those of us who fail. And what player at whatever level can boast never-ending success? Although I have an error-strewn CV of my own - shouldering arms to a ball that took out my middle stump whilst batting to save a match must be top of the table - it's back to the drop of my team-mate that inspired this article.

My coping strategy isn't winning the following series, opening a pub, praising the opposition or moving on with a near-psychopathic ambition, but cosmic philosophy.

In a universe of infinite possibilities, on a planet where sport has conspired to pit the amateur against the professional, my team-mate holds aloft a red sphere, Mark Ramprakash has tucked his bat under his arm, and we're leaping for joy.

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

 

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

• Neil Gaiman
• theguardian.com, Tuesday 15 October 2013 14.51 BST

'We have an obligation to imagine' … Neil Gaiman gives The Reading Agency annual lecture on the future of reading and libraries. Photograph: Robin Mayes

It's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I'm an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living though my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And I'm here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And it's that change, and that act of reading that I'm here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it's good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

 No such thing as a bad writer... Enid Blyton's Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you liked those you'll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this:

The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

 Tolkien's illustration of Bilbo's home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollins

Another way to destroy a child's love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That's about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

 Photograph: Alamy

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access toebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world. It's a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account".

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations. I thought I'd try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we 've lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

• This is an edited version of Neil Gaiman's lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agency's annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

The zone and the importance of imagination

A sportsman in the zone, like an artist, has both a wider and a narrower focus. He has the ability to be in the game and yet stand above it, seeing it clearly

Ed Smith

December 16, 2012

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	Mike Brearley: went beyond merely visualising a desirable outcome Adrian Murrell / © Getty Images

Mike Brearley, the former England and Middlesex captain, recently gave a talk about "the zone". Before cricket, Mike was an academic philosopher; after cricket, he became a psychoanalyst. Taken as a whole, professional sport is a relatively small proportion of Mike's career. But it afforded him an intense period of practical absorption and experience. Looking back on three careers spread over one varied life, Mike spoke to an audience at the London School of Economics about what cricket had taught him about concentration, technique and freedom.

Sometimes the best way to define something is to describe its antithesis. "The zone" can be a slippery concept. But we all know what bad form feels like. Brearley began with a memorable description of a player in crisis: "We try to focus on all sorts of things that should be unconscious - like the centipede, who, trying to think about each leg before it moves, ends up on its back on a ditch." 

"The zone" is the opposite. When we are in the zone, there is a sense of effortlessness, your body acting as though it does not require instructions from the mind. Many batsmen have written about the zone, but this was the first time I've heard anyone describe "captaincy in the zone". 

It was 1982 and Brearley was captaining Middlesex against Nottinghamshire. It was a bouncy pitch, and he was trying to think of a way to dismiss the opposition star player, Clive Rice. Brearley not only sensed there was a chance of Rice misjudging the bounce - many captains would have done that - he also began to imagine as though he, Brearley, was in fact the batsman.

In Brearley's phrase, "Here I felt my way into Rice's body and the shape of the shot. I sensed there might be a thick outside edge, and I pictured the ball flying to a deep wide slip, perhaps 20 yards back. I put Clive Radley in this position, and shortly afterwards it went straight to him at catching height. When something similar happened in the second innings, this time on the leg side, Rice thought there was something magical about my captaincy; in fact, it was a mixture of bodily intuition laced with a great deal of luck."

Brearley is describing something rarely discussed in a sporting context: the practical value of imagination. It transcended merely "visualising" a probable outcome. Brearley used his imagination, as a novelist might, to bring to life a very unlikely potential scenario. "Many years later," he added, "I saw a film of Bushmen hunting a deer on foot. As they followed the tracks of the deer in the stony ground, the hunters 'became' the deer, using the identification to find the faint footprints in the ground; they shaped themselves into the way of moving and likely course of the deer."

It is a rare perspective. We hear a lot about plans, very little about imagination; much about strategy, little about adaptiveness. Brearley's point is that a captain has to balance conscious planning with imaginative hunches.

A team can also enter "the zone", just as a single player does. Brearley explained what happens when a team is "hot": "Each player breathes in the others at their best, is strengthened by that identification, and gives off similar vibes to the rest of the team."

Note how the positivity becomes self-perpetuating, even contagious. That is why good teams always have a strong core of senior players: this core takes the weaker "waverers" with them on the journey towards self-belief. Thus the team - rather than being just a list of individuals - becomes an organic entity in its own right. One of the truest phrases about good teams is that they become "more than the sum of their parts".

What of the individual? One of the thrilling aspects of watching a player in the zone - and I am thinking more of football and rugby than cricket - is the sense that he is both aware of the whole pitch and yet totally absorbed in the small details; he is ahead of the game, yet also living in the here and now.

I once had a memorable conversation with the film director Stephen Frears about the French footballer Zinedine Zidane. Frears saw parallels between a football playmaker in full flow and a film-maker in the zone. "What I really admire - and you see it particularly in players who are just past their prime - is the feeling that what they have lost physically they make up for by seeing the whole picture. They grasp the shape of the game. They can somehow stand above it and see it clearly."

Brearley calls this "seeing the wood and the trees: he looks and takes in the detail; but he also looks with a broader gaze, in a way that allows unconscious ideas and connections to flow". The sportsman in the zone, like the artist, has both a wider and a narrower focus.

This sounds very abstract. What does it feel like in more practical terms? I would say I felt fully "in the zone" only a few times in my career. One day, when I made 149 for Kent in about a session and a half, stands out. And, looking back on it, there was that sense of both narrower and wider focus. I remember being aware of gaps in the field. In fact, there seemed to be a ready-made "channel" - it seemed to exist in its own right - running in a line to the boundary, dissecting mid-off and extra cover. 

Time and again I hit the ball into that channel, as though I had only to aim vaguely in that direction and my body subconsciously directed the ball exactly into the gap between the fielders. Without straining or thinking about it, I could both watch the ball onto the bat, and yet also see that channel leading to the boundary rope.

Later I tried to recall what batting felt like that day: "You stay in the present, enjoying it for what it is: the feel of the bat in the hand, the rhythm of the ball arriving in sync with the shot, the feel of the earth under feet, a lightness and yet a rootedness. Your mind is revving at the same rate as the pace of the game. There is no sense of being rushed (the ball arriving too soon) or impatience (wanting the balls to be delivered quicker). There is harmony. I felt very clearly, on that day in July 2003, that my role was to not get in the way - to make myself the conduit more than the agent."

Brearley described batting in "the zone" in similar terms. But on one point I disagreed, or at least had a different take on things. Brearley interpreted "the zone" as an extreme version of the more common phenomenon of "good form". At one level that is obviously true. But I feel that "the zone" exists in a different sphere to the question of form. Form is an achievement, the zone is a feeling. A batsman can enjoy a spell of scoring heavily without getting anywhere close to the zone. The zone is subtler than form, more mysterious.

	I would draw a distinction between success that follows from an effort of will and success that is just allowed to happen. I associate the zone with "letting go", relinquishing the controlling grip of your own will power

In particular, I would draw a distinction between success that follows from an effort of will and success that is just allowed to happen. (I acknowledge that even the latter relies on a great deal of preliminary hard work and practice.) I associate the zone with "letting go", relinquishing the controlling grip of your own will power. In the zone, the world is co-operative; you do not have to bend it to your will.

An awkward, perhaps impossible, question follows: what is the sportsman's optimal relationship with his own will power? On the one hand, we know that will power drives athletes to many of their victories. And yet I also believe that your controlling mind prevents you from playing at your absolute best.

So would you achieve more if you trusted yourself just to "play", instead of trying to manipulate events with your will power and strength of character? I suspect the answer is different for different players.

A good example of two opposite approaches is the rivalry of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Nadal relies on his phenomenal will power - as though he draws confidence from the strength of his own character. Federer, in contrast, seems to play best when he does not interfere with his own talent. It is as though Federer's brilliance exists of itself, in its own right: he merely has to set it free. It must be difficult to advise Federer when he is losing: "try harder", "fight more" - those ideas seem entirely inappropriate for his game.

Maybe for some players (the Federer type), the zone is almost a prerequisite of performance. For others (the Nadal type), the zone is practically an irrelevance.

****

At the dinner after Mike's talk, where the guests were mostly LSE professors, I reflected how easily he could be mistaken for a distinguished lecturer in philosophy. And yet each of the worlds he has touched - academia, sport, psychoanalysis - has benefited from insights and experiences he developed in the others. Had Mike lived a narrower life, and focused on one strand to the exclusion of the others, I suspect he would have had a less surprising life - and, I think, a less influential one. Breadth, paradoxically, can lead to depth.

By nature I am an optimist: my firm conviction is that sport is getting better in many respects. But I could not escape a feeling of sadness that it is highly unlikely that a similar career could happen in today's ultra-professional sporting world. I doubt an academic philosopher in his 20s would be persuaded to return to professional cricket, or that a professional cricketer, having retired from the game in early middle age, would subsequently pursue a full career in psychotherapy.

Perhaps Mike's insights will help a new generation of players get into the zone more often. But I suspect the particular zone he experienced is an increasingly uninhabited space.

Aggressive Captaincy

	Michael Clarke doesn't give his bowlers protective fields by default like many other captains © Getty Images Enlarge
Related Links Review 2011 : 'We need a deep point. What if he gets four?' Players/Officials: Michael Clarke Series/Tournaments: Australia tour of West Indies Teams: Australia

Captains: follow Clarke's lead

In the long run, captains who aim to win and set fields that will get them wickets are the ones who will succeed and last

Ian Chappell

April 22, 2012

Michael Clarke is quickly establishing a well-deserved reputation for brave and aggressive captaincy. His entertaining approach is based on one premise: trying to win the match from the opening delivery. This should be the aim of all international captains, but sadly it isn't.

In every era there are Test captains who prefer to attain a position of safety before they go all out for victory. These captains are frightened stiff of the Michael Clarkes, who make it obvious they are not interested in a draw. At least 50% of international captains consider a draw to be a good result and when that option is removed they easily panic.

The first thing a captain like Clarke understands is that he will lose some matches in constantly striving for victory. Once that premise is accepted the captain has reached the stage where he hates to lose but doesn't fear it. There's a huge difference: the latter is a positive state where the captain will do everything in his power to win; the former a mindset where the captain sets out not to lose.

An important indicator of a captain's thinking is his field placings. A positive captain will always make the opposing batsmen feel their very existence is threatened. Through his field placings he allows his bowlers to turn at the top of their mark and see where a wicket (other than bowled, lbw or through the batsman's stupidity) can be claimed. 

A bowler operating to a purely containing field is like Zorro without his sword; he's not very threatening. There has been plenty of discussion on whether the shorter forms of the game will adversely affect batting techniques and turn bowlers into cannon fodder. What the 50- and 20-over matches have actually had a marked influence on is field placings.

Whereas the No. 1 priority, by a wide margin, used to be taking wickets, followed by saving singles, and then, way off in the distance, stopping boundaries, in the mind of the modern captain the last one has assumed far too much importance.

The almost robotic use in Test matches of a deep cover point and a backward square leg on the boundary, regardless of whether the ball is being played in that direction, borders on mindless captaincy. When a fieldsman is unemployed for half an hour but the captain still retains him in that position, you have to wonder: who appointed this captain?

The change in attitude to field placings is perfectly summed up with some typical Caribbean humour and common sense.

Former West Indies fast bowler Herman Griffith was captaining a Barbados club side in the 1930s once, and called on his debutant offspinner to have a trundle. "Where do you want the field?" asked Griffith politely.

"I'd like a deep-backward square leg, a midwicket on the boundary and a long-on and long-off," replied the youngster.

"Give me the ball," growled Griffith.

Not unreasonably, the young man asked, "Why?"

"You intending to bowl shite," came the forthright answer.

Nowadays, most bowlers would be horrified if the captain didn't automatically give him a number of protective fielders in the deep. Clarke is not such a captain.

Sadly, his latest gambit - a challenging declaration at the Queen's Park Oval, which was answered with equal bravado by Darren Sammy, failed because of inclement weather. Nevertheless, it's to be hoped their positive endeavours have acted as a sharp reminder to the administrators.

In Test cricket the captain is allowed free rein. We've seen in the case of Clarke and Sammy what's possible when two captains use a bit of imagination and have a desire to produce a result. It's impossible to legislate for captaincy imagination. In the 50-over game, which is highly regulated through a variety of Powerplays, and bowling and field restrictions, there is less real captaincy involved.

Wherever possible, the captaincy should be left to the skippers, and those with imagination will prosper. Hopefully those who lack inspiration and the nerve to face a challenge will be quickly replaced by the selectors.

Former Australia captain Ian Chappell is now a cricket commentator and columnist

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Switch is a hit

Mark Nicholas in Cricinfo

Pity the umpire in the split second before the switch hit. ICC's directive picks the moment that a bowler's back foot lands as the start of the delivery. From this point the batsman can do as he pleases with hands and feet but not before. Three times Kevin Pietersen made to switch and three times Tillakaratne Dilshan pulled away from releasing his offbreak. On the third occasion Asad Rauf warned Pietersen for time wasting. 

Incredible really. International teams bowl their overs at 13 an hour and no one blinks an eye while the most thrilling batsman makes to switch hit and finds himself on the wrong side of the law. Not Rauf's fault, he is the messenger and one with a lot on his plate. Rauf could not possibly have been sure of exactly the moment when Pietersen changed his stance because he was watching Dilshan's back foot. Er, or was he watching Dilshan's front foot, lest he no ball? Hmm, or was he watching the return crease, lest he no ball there? Or was he intent on the striker's end of the wicket, the business end, with the popping crease in his peripheral? Or was he briefly somewhere else? Long days out there in the Colombo sun.

David Warner's switch hit six over mid-off - or is it mid-on?- in a T20I against India earlier this year rang the bells once more. Now Pietersen has them clanging like Notre Dame. The switch hit is different from the reverse hit because the batsman swaps his hands on the bat and rotates his body 180 degrees, to become a left-hander in Pietersen's case. Generally, the stroke is a plus for a game that is not completely sure how to embrace the 21st century. When it is played successfully spectators, quite literally, gasp in wonder. They talk about it, most love it. We don't see it often because it is difficult, showy and takes big cojones. It's right up Pietersen's street, and Warner's. Less so say Andrew Strauss or Rahul Dravid. But they wouldn't want to stand in the way of progress.

There are two things to consider here. Cricket's lifeline is the balance between bat and ball. Given the bowler must commit to releasing the ball from one side of the wicket and with a part of his foot behind the popping crease, the batsman who is not so shackled must give something away if he wishes to change striking position. This should be leg stump.

As the law stands, a batsman should not be given out lbw if the ball pitches outside leg stump. A simple change to that law, effectively taking the leg-stump advantage away from the batsman would even it up. Thus, if you choose to switch hit you forego your leg stump and can be lbw if you are hit between wicket and wicket either way round.

The second thing is the ICC directive mentioned above. Once the bowler is at the point of delivery there is little he can do in response to the batsman's move. The directive should be that the batsman may do as he pleases from the start of the bowlers' approach to the crease. This way the bowler has a better chance to respond and should not feel that pulling way is his only defence. Were the lbw law changed, the bowler would have an aggressive option and may even see the batsman's change of stance as an opportunity to take his wicket.

From this more evenly balanced reaction to the switch hit would come the conclusion that it is the bowler who is timewasting by refusing to deliver. Not the batsman, who is bringing to the game his sense of imagination and adventure.