Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage

Dear Mr. Jacobs,

We at the National Book Foundation read your article, “Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage,” and would like to congratulate you on a terrific piece. Our mission is to promote reading to all audiences in America, so we’re grateful to come across articles like yours. We also thought you might be interested to know about our educational program, BookUpNYC, through which we strive to get middle-schoolers excited about books and reading. In addition to having writer-instructors conduct after-school sessions in New York City-area schools, we also take the kids on field trips to local literary sites and bookstores where they can purchase $25 worth of books to help build their own personal libraries at home. Though we’re already passionate about the work we do in programs such as BookUpNYC, your article provided further encouragement that what we’re doing is not only a worthy but also a productive pursuit.

If you’d like further information about BookUpNYC, please visit http://www.nationalbook.org/bookupnyc.html.

Greg,

I think the prominence of the display is a key factor here. I don’t know how prominently you could display a Kindle, but having one for every family member might lend some of the symbolic might of reading that a house full of books has.

Then again, I don’t know how much iconic value a 500-book Kindle would have as compared to a 5-book Kindle. As a physical symbol, they’re indistinguishable.

Help a child who has no home library start one! Go to http://www.firstbook.org and make a small donation to provide a child with their very first book to own. Every home library has to start somewhere.

This reminds me of something my youngest said when he was six. We were planning a move out of the DC area and when asked for his input he said “I just want to be someplace clean and quiet and ready.” He pronounced that “reedy” as in a place to read. He wanted a place to hole up with one of his many books and didn’t really care in which state it was located.

I really enjoyed this piece. I grew up (I’m now 55) in a small midwest farm town. At that time neither my mother or step-father were big readers – neither had gone past high school – but my mother did have one book shelf that held a surprising range of books. They were mostly the popular fiction of the mid 20th century – Frank Yerby, Jack London, that sort of thing, but had a few surprises, too, like Shakespeare, Dickens and even Balzac.
I went on to get a BA in Literature and have been an avid – and wide ranging – reader all my life. My current library contains something over 500 volumes, most of them hardback. I completely credit my love of literature, history, science fiction, and all the rest to the ready availability of those first musty volumes.

In 1951, pregnant with my first child, a friend advised,”Start reading to her as soon as she is born.” I did. At 6 mos., she knew when I skipped or mispronounced a word and would look up at me questionably and point her finger at the book. I would then re-read the sentence.

Today she had advanced degrees and is nationally known in her specialized field. Key: Start early to develop knowledge and love for books/education. It’s worked for all 3 of my children.

I’m a bit wary of the conclusions drawn in this article — perhaps the author has confused cause and effect. Full bookshelves don’t create scholarly children; parents do. The quantity of reading material in the home is almost certainly less a factor in a child’s educational success than his or her parents’ genetic makeup, academic encouragement, and intellectual curiosity. I’d argue that the books are the evidence of the forces at work, and not the force itself.

In almost every law firm office we’ve designed in the past decade, the law library has been the among of the first components to disappear as these firms sought ways to reduce their spatial footprint in areas of high cost real estate. Online legal information services allow an attorney to access almost any reference information at the desk that used to be in books and journals.

In the continuing discussion about the relevance of libraries in law firms, schools and communities, and the parallel discussion about any ongoing relevance of print, this is an interesting piece of input into the evaluation of the costs, and benefits of the physical.

Does the presence of a library act as a symbol of certain values in family or community? What might be the influence of the home with a half-dozen iPads sitting around instead of books? And does the reduction of the scale of technology down to the size of a magazine (enabling it to become a booklike-portable part of the flow of life rather than a desk-bound device) give it a similar resonance about intellectual openness and curiosity that the library did?

Certainly no one doubts the importance that a culture of reading has in a child’s formation, or that such a culture is more important than the mere presence or ownership of books. But I would not be so quick to dismiss the home library for its own sake. I would not be able to conclude more without first reading the study, but parents, educators, and librarians know that access to a wide variety of reading material is a significant factor in education. The presence of books increases the opportunities for exploration with or without a parent/guide, encourages intellectual curiosity, and allows a child to satisfy such curiosity more independently. Surely that is part of why each additional book constitutes an educational gain, and why such gains are more significant in less-educated households, where, for a number of reasons, a culture of reading may be (though not necessarily is) less likely to exist.

I would argue that a home library is an inside into the culture of a family. At the very least, the child has access to all kinds of ideas. I remember reading a biographical account of the author Gary Paulsen once; he grew up in a family of fighting drunks and books were his way onwards and forwards. In his case, a caring librarian made all the difference. No matter the size of a home (or public) library, having access to books is very important.

One of the biggest influences in my intellectual life, growing up, was access to the bookshelves in my house. My parents were college teachers, and as I lounged in my parents’ den, I would see the books, pick them up, and read them. My mother’s collection of novels such as Native Son and The Sound and the Fury, plays by Henrik Ibsen, and theological books by C. S. Lewis beckoned me to pick them up, open them, and explore them. When I needed something to read, all I had to do was browse my parents’ shelves.

I also was lucky enough to live across the street from my parents’ college and have access to the children’s reading room, set up for teachers in training, and filled with books for all ages. My friend Debra and I spent one summer, when we were 9 or 10, riding our bikes to that library every day and reading right there in that room—no need to check anything out! We had a good public library in town and we used it too, but the college library was right there and the reading room was a little hideaway we had all to ourselves.

When I try to imagine a world without physical books, where everything is digital and electronic, I always wonder how our kids would be exposed to the stories? Would they choose to pick up an e-reader and scroll up and down on a tiny screen, or will they just default to the video game and television set sitting right in front of them? How would they be aware that the books exist? That’s one of many reasons I think the physical book will never go away, although e-books are fine for some purposes.

Wal-Mart is said to have a display system called “Actionality” where likely impulse purchases are put right out in front of the consumers in order to attract their attention and sell more items, whether they were intending to get those things or not. Books need to be out in front of our children, where they can see them, pick them up, and flip through them. Else they will probably never know that a lot of these books ever existed.

My childhood home, staffed by junior-college graduate parents, contained some books, but not a lot. But grandma read me stories, and I frequented town and school libraries, and books absorbed me. My house is now filled with printed material. My daughter’s house isn’t, although she’s several degrees beyhond me. Her kids read

In Toronto, Canada there is a storefront gem, The Children’s Book Bank where a book-a-day is given to any child under 12 to help build their own “home library”.
http://www.childrensbookbank.com/
and also
http://www.blogto.com/books_lit/2008/11/torontos_first_childrens_book_bank_turns_half/

“I like to own my own books because I can read them many times.”
Kulisara
Age 7
(from the website)

This is wonderful news for a home with 1500+ books! Our son is homeschooled and when he's not doing "school work" he has a book from our shelves, or the library (we go 3 x's/week) in his hand. He even tries to read in the shower! Thanks for a great article!