Given that the coronavirus is disrupting all our educational routines - and, in particular, shutting down many of those informal opportunities for spontaneity and personal interaction - many are turning to high-tech solutions. However, maybe the smarter response would be to return to one of the oldest forms of technology: the book.

Books, more than any other information source, can spark a very special kind of conversation. I think the connections between books and their most famous readers throw an intriguing light on both and are instructive to teachers not just in how they view books but how they view the books that children are given or choose to read. Inspirational texts are threads that tie together individuals as diverse as Jimmy Carter and Henry Ford, Jane Goodall and Barack Obama, Malcolm X and judge Clarence Thomas, Larry Page and Charles Darwin, Oprah Winfrey and Malala Yousafzai.

Take Oprah, the chat-show-host-turned-media-personality. She has always been a fan of books, and features chosen ones on her show, the highest-rated TV chat show in history. But she also claims to have been guided in her life by an esoteric work of new-age philosophy: The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. One idea definitely struck a chord: that everything you do in life should be guided not by calculations of utility but by values and a worthwhile intention. 

A similar conviction clearly guided Yousafzai. She talks about reading a novel by Paulo Coelho, which describes life not merely as a train but as a journey needing a destination. In her early life, Yousafzai was focused on the promotion of reading - in her case as an advocate for books for girls in Afghan schools, until the day when she was shot by the Taliban for these beliefs.

Which books inspired Obama? In a July 2008 interview, shortly after his nomination as the Democratic candidate for the US presidency, Obama discussed both his plans and his influences. Asked to list three books that inspired him, he offered Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the tragedies of William Shakespeare and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

This last book is a war story, based on Hemingway’s observations as a journalist during the bitter civil war in Spain in the 1930s. It is full of gritty passages with a life-or-death flavour that recall the spirit of the Spanish republicans in their ultimately futile bid to stave off the better-equipped fascists. The book offers lines such as: “Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.” It’s a great line for a politician (and also for a headteacher).

However, in an interview that Obama gave to The New York Times in the week before he stepped down from the presidency - to make way for Donald Trump, who doesn’t seem to read many books - he made reference to a very different kind of text. Describing how books guided him out of his turbulent and disconnected teenage years, helping him to work out who he was, he mentioned Where the Wild Things Are, the children’s picture book by Maurice Sendak. 

Where the Wild Things Are is a book that talks to a child, at odds with his mother, lost in the threatening jungle of life. For those not familiar with it, the book consists of just 338 words, and concerns a young boy called Max, who, after dressing in a wolf costume, wreaks such havoc at home that he is sent to bed without supper. However, his bedroom then mysteriously changes into a jungle, and the boy winds up sailing to an island inhabited by vicious beasts. Far from being scared, Max faces down the creatures and ends up as king of the wild things, enjoying a playful rumpus with his new subjects. 

When the psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb analysed Sendak’s book for The Psychologist journal in 2009, he had no doubt that the message was that destructive rage allows children to survive disappointments and loss. Gottlieb presents Where the Wild Things Are as a study of intense emotions - including disappointment, fury and even cannibalistic rage - and their transformation through creative activity and learning to dream. 

Could similar ingredients be said to exist in the voting public, which all political leaders must try to transform into positive energy?

Certainly, Obama channelled not just the hopes and aspirations but also the rage and disappointment of voters by offering them a political programme that gave them the right to dream. If America’s first black president is considered a very cool, unemotional leader, behind that surface is a much more complex and psychologically aware figure, who freely acknowledges the influence of this deceptively simple children’s book.

Inspiration, Obama knows, doesn’t come only in long, serious books. I have often found that the books that have the most enduring influence wear their learning lightly. 

Jane Goodall, the anthropologist who studies animal languages, reinforces this theory. The book that really made an impression on her was The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. Goodall recalls: “Mum got it for me from the library - we could not afford new books,” and that she read it at least twice before it had to go back.

In an interview in 2010, when asked what she thought were the greatest similarities she had observed between humans and anthropoid apes, Goodall replied: “The non-verbal communication: kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting on the back, swaggering, throwing rocks, using tools, making tools, nurturing infants …”

This is the message in The Story of Doctor Dolittle, too, delivered by parrot Polynesia: “Animals don’t always speak with their mouths. They talk with their ears, with their feet, with their tails, with everything. Sometimes they don’t want to make a noise.” 

Again, don’t be confused by the packaging. Simple texts can contain big ideas.

Or take another great environmentalist, Rachel Carson, whose own book about pesticides, Silent Spring, changed the way people saw the natural world. Carson was inspired by the mix of poetry and observation that is the classic tale of whale hunting, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Both Carson’s book and Melville’s ask hard questions about whether and why humans have the right to control nature, to decide who lives or dies, to poison and destroy non-human life.

Melville’s book seems to have guided Carson in two ways: first, in the insights it offers into marine life and, second, for those into human motivations and psychology.

Let’s take two more examples, this time from the worlds of science - often considered at odds with inspiring literature. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, is an American icon, often described as that nation’s greatest inventor. Harry Kroto, meanwhile, is a British academic who played a key role in the discovery of a new kind of carbon chemistry. Both combined the spark of imagination with the power of invention.

Formal education failed Edison, who was thrown out of school at the age of 7. His mother homeschooled him for the next five years, mainly on a diet of books. However, social norms were very different a century and a half ago. So, at the age of 12, Edison was obliged to find a job. He sold food, sweets and newspapers to the passengers on the Grand Trunk Railway. But his education didn’t stop there. In Detroit, he visited the free library and systematically worked his way through its entire stock.

Yet the books that really inspired him had already caught his eye, because they were on his father’s bookshelf: biographical accounts of the English philosopher Thomas Paine, usually remembered as the author of Common Sense, the pamphlet that fuelled the American Revolution.

In later life, Edison said: “I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages … Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardour made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.” 

The young Edison found in Paine a role model. Not least because (although it is not widely remembered) Paine was himself an engineer and experimenter. Edison wrote: “I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle, the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.”

A similar browsing curiosity seems to be true of Kroto. While you may not know the name, you’ve probably already benefited from his co-discovery, together with the American scientists Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, of a new form of carbon, fullerenes, which earned them a Nobel Prize in 1996. Their new way of seeing the universe affected science across areas ranging from cosmology to drug delivery and solar panels to light-emitting diodes.

Kroto was a voracious and wide-ranging reader. Following his Nobel win, he devoted himself to visiting schools and colleges, and campaigning for what he called “an astute analytical approach to all aspects of life”. It is this spirit that led Kroto to look with great curiosity into Plato’s theory of geometrical solids, while most mainstream philosophers - let alone chemists - hurried by.

Plato’s text, which is, after all, nearly 2,500 years old, is quite extraordinarily prescient in terms of the geometry of chemical elements. The central intuition is that the hidden structure of the elements creates their actual properties, and that elements are composed of a few basic geometrical shapes that combine to allow new possibilities. Fast-forward to Kroto’s new carbon compound, Buckminsterfullerene, a ball of 60 carbon atoms created out of the fusing of simpler pentagonal and hexagonal carbon shapes.

Kroto’s approach to reading was to browse widely, hoping to come across something unexpected. This goes against educational orthodoxy, yet it directly connected to his way of working where he valued unexpected results in the lab, at which point he would stop and investigate, often saying, “I think there’s something interesting there.”

So, what do our bookshelves really reveal about ourselves? The books that inspire and influence contain a glittering insight, but that idea or insight may be no more than a few lines on one page, and can be quite incidental to the main narrative. Perhaps the author, too, has come across it by chance. Is this the real magic of books? 

Martin Cohen is a writer and educator. His new book, The Leader’s Bookshelf: 25 Great Books and their Readers, is published in the US 

This article originally appeared in the 13 November 2020 issue under the headline “Your most powerful teaching tool? The humble book”