Kids Love to Tell Stories …till we hand them pen and paper
By Nick Dunkerley, Founder Hinderburg Systems
There’s a widespread belief that being able to read and write is somehow more educated.
More proper. More sophisticated.
More… grown-up than simply telling a story.
But is it?
Is the written word really “better”?
I’m not so sure.
Long before anyone wrote anything down—before ink, before books, before Comic Sans even—there were stories.
Picture the Ice Age tundra, somewhere in what we now call Europe.
The wind is sharp. The air smells of pine, fur, and the remains of a recent scuffle.
There stands Glokk. Upright. Proud.
A rock in one hand. A very surprised, somewhat dented mammoth by his side.
It had been a good day. He felt immensely proud.
Time to brag.
“Big hunt. Cold river. Rock. Mammoth fall. Wham! I did that!”
His vocabulary may not have been Shakespearean.He wouldn’t have crushed a TED Talk.
But it was enough.
Enough to tell the story.
Enough to make it legendary.
“Glokk. Big head. So over him…”
Bragging — and, subsequently, gossip — is probably one of the main reasons language evolved in the first place.
Stories were told and passed on. From campfire to campfire. From tribe to tribe. From generation to generation.
They became part of our DNA.
Myths and traditions flowed through every ancient culture.
They became the cornerstone of how we understood ourselves — how societies were shaped, values passed on, and identities formed.
All spoken out loud
Narrative storytelling is intertwined with our being.
It grabs us by the heart.
It makes us laugh. Cry.
And stare wide-eyed into the dark.
And that tradition continued for thousands of years.
We had the bards.
Wandering, singing historians.
Telling tales set to rhythm and rhyme.
A kind of melodic breaking news.
The updates were less frequent.
But infinitely more poetic.
Oral storytelling was the way information travelled.
But it had a shortcoming: it wasn’t very efficient for shopping.
So, around 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, 145,000 years after Glokk’s mammoth tale, the Sumerians began scratching cuneiform symbols into clay tablets to record stock and trade.
Later, writing would be carved into stone, painted onto papyrus, or inked onto parchment.
It gave us ledgers. Archives. A record of who did what, and when.
And as societies grew and ideas needed to spread further, the written word became more common.
But reading and writing were still reserved for the elite.
Mainly tradesmen and religious scholars.
Writing didn’t truly take off until the 15th century, when Gutenberg figured out how to press ink to paper at industrial speed.
Apparently, the Bible was in high demand at the time — at least that’s where he started.
But soon, pamphlets, newspapers, scientific journals, and books of every kind rolled off the presses.
The printed word became the internet of its day.
Information was finally scalable.
Ready for mass distribution.
It became the cornerstone of a growing economy.
And that changed everything.
The Industrial Revolution
In the 18th and 19th centuries, factories needed workers.
Workers needed to read instructions, follow rules, show up on time, fill out forms — and receive a collective message.
So education systems evolved.
Not as temples of creativity, but as tools of economic necessity.
At the centre of it all?
Books.
Printed materials were cheap. Repeatable. Easy to grade with a red pen.
If you had thousands of children and not enough teachers, books were the logical choice.
All you had to do was teach every child to read.
Brilliant. Efficient.
But was it better?
Maybe.
But not for everyone.
Around 8–10% of the population lives with dyslexia.
And beyond that, up to 20% of people struggle with reading in some way.
That’s one in five.
Some were never taught properly.
Others simply never felt comfortable with reading.
And I imagine there’s a whole category of people who would genuinely rather cuddle a hedgehog than read a book.
And who can blame them?
Not me.
For many of us, school was where the story began, and where we quietly pinned labels on ourselves.
Slow reader.
Bad speller.
Daydreamer.
Stupid.
A small mark on a report card that somehow became part of our identity.
Because when you struggle to read or write in a system built entirely around it,
you start to believe the problem isn’t the system.
It’s you.
The shame seeps in early.
That feeling doesn’t vanish after school.
It follows you. Into university.
Into work.
Into conversations where people toss around “simple” documents or say things like “just write a quick email.”
You learn to mask it.
To double-check everything.
To smile and joke your way through it.
But deep down, that voice, the one that whispers you’re slow, never really shuts up.
For me, I’d take the hedgehog any day.
School was not a happy place.
I remember getting my written essay back.
The one on the history of pirates that I had enjoyed imagining in my head.
It came back covered in red pen.
Death by a thousand paper cuts.
If I was asked to read out loud, the words would jumble on the page.
And spelling? Don’t get me started.
“If you can’t spell it, look it up in the dictionary!”
But how do you do that… if you can’t spell the word?
Try looking up psychology under “S.”
Going to school and having a knot in my stomach?
Same thing. I felt stupid.
And this, this, is the reality for so many children.
Glokk didn’t have to put up with this s###.
The Glokk way
Why, when a teacher assigns a five-page essay on the French Revolution, can’t little Pete or Molly grab a mic?
Why can’t they re-enact the storming of the Bastille?
With sound effects, narration, music, and character voices…
Why are we still insisting stories must be written?
The answer, I suspect, points back to one word: efficiency.
The written word is easy to file.
Easy to grade.
Easy to archive.
But maybe, just maybe, we’re losing sight of what really matters.
Our ability to connect.
To create.
To communicate.
All of us.
Not just the children who are comfortable with pen and paper.
Oral storytelling is the O.G.
It’s been around since the dawn of time. Literally.
It’s not a novelty.
It’s not a gimmick.
It captures nuance in ways writing rarely can.
It’s emotional. Embodied. Inclusive.
It’s human.
So maybe it’s time we handed kids the mic.
Let them speak.
Let them listen.
Let them hear their classmates’ voices.
Let them create montages with music, silence, rhythm and pause.
Let them feel free to tell the stories they imagine.
Let’s praise their imagination — not just their ability to spell onomatopoeia.
“Now, Glokk… tell me about the mammoth.”
Author, Nick Dunkerley Founder Hinderburg Systems