Resources

A speech by Margaret Hamilton recapping a career in Australian Children's literature starting as an assistant in a library to becoming a librarian, through book retailing and into publishing. A nice snapshot of the development of children's literature in Australia over the past fifty years.

Falling Forward

An article (May 31st, 2007) in The Economist makes the point about the huge disparity in exposure to language between groups of people. The article is actually about the role of marriage in wealth maintenance and creation in different classes but has this aside about the impact of those differences on language exposure.

Research also suggests that middle- and working-class parents approach child-rearing in different ways. Professional parents shuttle their kids from choir practice to baseball camp and check that they are doing their homework. They also talk to them more. One study found that a college professor's kids hear an average of 2,150 words per hour in the first years of life. Working-class children hear 1,250 and those in welfare families only 620.

A lifetime's passion starts here
by Amanda Craig
The Times, January 7, 2006

A nice article on parent's and reading with a set of suggestions of when to introduce which titles.

Books are not toys; they are much more magical than that, they are windows into the world of story. Children who have learnt to love books are never bored — how could they be, plugged into some of the greatest entertainment of all time? Yet the gulf between being simply able to read and finding words a uniquely rich source of pleasure is vast. This is a burden — or a privilege — that has to fall on parents. By the time a child gets to school, it's almost too late, especially if school makes the fatal association between work and reading rather than adventure and reading.

On the assumption that your child has enough vocabulary to understand words such as cat, run, mouse and rabbit, I recommend beginning with . . .

Once upon a time we told our children stories
by Michael Morpurgo
The Times
March 3, 2005

FOR THE past 18 months in my role as Children's Laureate I have been travelling the country telling stories to young readers and young writers, telling how this particular weaver of tales writes his stories. Like some superannuated strolling player, I have set up and performed wherever anyone would let me: in tiny village halls, grand concert halls, in tents and bookshops and school halls and, once, in an old people's home; from audiences of 14 children in the small island school on Jura in the Hebrides, to 2,500 people in the Albert Hall. I have talked to families — grandparents, parents and children together. In Broughton-in-Furness and Ulverston in the Lake District, I spoke to children from 24 village schools. All came wide-eyed with excitement and expectancy. I strutted my story stuff as best I could, read to them, and answered their questions: "Were you good at writing when you were young?" "No. But I was unbelievably good at rugby," I told them, and sent them and their teachers away, buzzing, I hope, about books, enthused to read more and feeling that they, too, have a story to tell and a voice with which to tell it.

Today, World Book Day, hundreds of my fellow writers, and storytellers, illustrators, librarians, teachers and booksellers, are doing just what I've been doing. Indeed, they do it all the year round: this is not a one-day wonder. This kind of sustained effort to bring children to books and books to children is much needed and is, in my view, the most effective way of persuading children to become readers and writers.

It is effective because it is personal and because the children know it is meant. Here is someone in front of them who loves stories, who tells them with such passion that the world of reading, the sheer joy, fun and wonder of it, can be opened up to children who may never have enjoyed books at all. A young life can be changed that way, enriched for ever.

When you think of the extraordinary talent among our children's writers, storytellers and illustrators, it is not surprising that so many children turn to books and become readers after just such an encounter.

Writers and illustrators visit schools all the time, the books exist, various and brilliant enough for all ages and tastes, the publishers design them beautifully, there are dedicated librarians, teachers and booksellers working their socks off to engage children in reading and there are bold and imaginative initiatives such as World Book Day, the wonderful Book Start project and Storyquest. So why do we fail to engage so many children? . . .

Finding Neverland
By Barbara Feinberg
Boston Globe
July 17, 2005

One night, when my daughter was about to turn 7, I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. We discussed various toys, and after a while she began to drift off to sleep. I had just tiptoed out when she jolted awake and suddenly sat up. There must have been a moon through the window, because I recall the bright clarity of her face. ''I know just what I want!" she said. ''I want a little room. One you could put in my real room." . . .

Dahl's stern morality gives his work the edge
Nicolette Jones
Times Online June 21, 2005

ROALD DAHL has a reputation for subversiveness and political incorrectness, which most people assume is why children love reading him. When his books were promoted in a television advertisement, its slogan was: "Nice children don't read Dahl". In fact, Dahl's books are a mixture of wild impropriety and very high standards indeed of children's behaviour — and that of their parents.

Yes, Dahl lets George poison his bad-tempered grandmother in George's Marvellous Medicine with a concoction that includes paraffin, sheep-dip and engine oil. He lets Matilda put superglue inside her father's hat. A child in the same novel puts itching powder in her headteacher's gym knickers. The hero of Danny, the Champion of the World, who is about 10, takes it upon himself to drive his father's car several miles. And in James and the Giant Peach the horrible aunts Sponge and Spiker are run over until they are "ironed out upon the grass as flat and thin and lifeless as a couple of paper dolls cut out of a picture book", though the hit-and-run peach is not, to be fair, really under James's control. . . .

Once Upon a Time We Told Our Children Stories
Michael Morpurgo
The Times March 3, 2005

FOR THE past 18 months in my role as Children's Laureate I have been travelling the country telling stories to young readers and young writers, telling how this particular weaver of tales writes his stories. Like some superannuated strolling player, I have set up and performed wherever anyone would let me: in tiny village halls, grand concert halls, in tents and bookshops and school halls and, once, in an old people's home; from audiences of 14 children in the small island school on Jura in the Hebrides, to 2,500 people in the Albert Hall. I have talked to families — grandparents, parents and children together. In Broughton-in-Furness and Ulverston in the Lake District, I spoke to children from 24 village schools. All came wide-eyed with excitement and expectancy. I strutted my story stuff as best I could, read to them, and answered their questions: "Were you good at writing when you were young?" "No. But I was unbelievably good at rugby," I told them, and sent them and their teachers away, buzzing, I hope, about books, enthused to read more and feeling that they, too, have a story to tell and a voice with which to tell it.

Today, World Book Day, hundreds of my fellow writers, and storytellers, illustrators, librarians, teachers and booksellers, are doing just what I've been doing. Indeed, they do it all the year round: this is not a one-day wonder. This kind of sustained effort to bring children to books and books to children is much needed and is, in my view, the most effective way of persuading children to become readers and writers. . . .

A lifetime's passion starts here
By Amanda Craig
The Times January 7, 2006

TO GET A CHILD AGED under 7 hooked on books may seem to be the hardest thing you've done. With an excellent Ultimate Book Guide for teenagers out next month from A & C Black, and the launch of www.readingzone.com, a website funded by the Arts Council, it has never been easier to find good books — though persuading a child to fall in love with them is still another matter.

Books are not toys; they are much more magical than that, they are windows into the world of story. Children who have learnt to love books are never bored — how could they be, plugged into some of the greatest entertainment of all time? Yet the gulf between being simply able to read and finding words a uniquely rich source of pleasure is vast. This is a burden — or a privilege — that has to fall on parents. By the time a child gets to school, it's almost too late, especially if school makes the fatal association between work and reading rather than adventure and reading. . . .

It is so delightful when you find someone who has written a piece on an issue which you might have been mulling over and find that they have written about it much better than you ever could have.

One of the issues motivating the establishment of Through the Magic Door has been to try and counteract the very large volume of unremittingly negative children's books that have come out in the past couple of decades. Some of these are wonderfully well written. Many have been award winners. But there are so many and they are so dark.

It makes you want to take up arms - Optimists of the World Unite!

I have just discovered an author, Barbara Feinberg, who has written a delightful piece which is an exploration of why our children are being burdened with all these negative novels. Please take a look at her article, Reflections on the "Problem Novel" which is adapted from her book, Welcome to Lizard Motel.

With her delightful essay, I can safely point to her words and restrain myself from ranting.

Caleb Crain, in the December 24, 2007 edition of the New Yorker, has an article, Twilight of the Books.

One part book review of Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, one part summary of recent literacy stats, and one part speculative essay, it is a bit of a dog's breakfast but interesting none-the-less.

I don't agree with his somewhat dispirited conclusions but there is at least meat in the article which is perhaps more than can be said for most articles these days.

There are many cited statistics, almost every one of which sparks further questions as well as objections or ripostes. For example

In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002.

One wonders if this decline is a function of lack of demand on the part of the reading public or a function of lack of supply (quality) on the part of the writing population. Also, since these figures cover a period encompassing a massive migration into the country of people from low literacy backgrounds, one would expect there to be a significant erosion of reading as reported by respondents; was this factored in?

The article is interesting and I do agree with the article's premise that reading is an integral part of our recent human history and a causative factor in the development of our advanced civillization and that there are many mysteries; historical, physio/neurological, and social, attendant to the act of reading which we do not yet fully comprehend and that the barrage of new technologies (radio, TV, internet, etc.) are likely to change reading practices in some way but in ways that are only dimly discerned at this juncture.

In the Jaunary 11, 2008 New York Times, A.O. Scott has an article, Take the Kids, and Don't Feel Guilty, which you might find interesting.

His central argument is two-fold. Parents should look beyond easy rules of thumb in deciding what is beneficial for their children. Yes, we should seek age appropriate materials (movies in the case of his article and books in the case of TTMD). But we should be simultaneously seeking to expand their horizons in terms of both what they are familiar with and what they are comfortable with.

Which leads to his second point. The biggest impact is not the movie/book itself, but the conversations arising from it.

I agree with both points.

The Telegraph in the UK had an interesting article, Reading Shouldn't Be Such Hard Work by Alice Thomson this past week, in the January 11, 2008 edition.

Some interesting comments from readers follow as well.

An interview and article from a number of years ago on the old Homearts site with Harold Bloom. Recovered through The Wayback Machine.

An interview from the old Homearts site with Fay Weldon.

Here is an interesting article, The History of Children's Books written in January, 1888 by C.M. Hewins in the Atlantic Monthly. Yes, 1888.

In it, Hewins tracks the emergence of children's books in the English speaking world from the 1430's onwards, with some intriguing commentary of the development of this branch of literature in the USA.

Interesting to see these views and this synopsis in that year, just before children's literature really began to bloom in the US.

There is always a tension in reading. There is the tension between volume and quality (I need to finish this). There is the tension between the pleasure of the process and the realization that the more you enjoy the reading of a tale, the closer you are bringing yourself to its end. There is the tension between the art of tale telling and the value of what is being learned. And there is, as described by Francine Prose in her July, 2006 Atlantic Monthly article, Close Reading, the tension between losing yourself in the dyanmic of the story and studying the mechanics of how the story is constructed.

A couple of quotes:

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be?

I like that; "as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be".

And she has a wonderful evocation of that discovery, long after one has become proficient in reading but well before one is wise in it, of the depth of thought that can go into the construction of a story.

When I was a high school junior, our English teacher assigned a term paper on the theme of blindness in Oedipus Rex and King Lear. We were supposed to go through the two tragedies and circle every reference to eyes, light, darkness, and vision, then draw some conclusion on which we would base our final essay.

The exercise seemed to us dull, mechanical. We felt we were way beyond it. All of us knew that blindness played a starring role in both dramas.

Still, we liked our English teacher, and we wanted to please him. And searching for every relevant word turned out to have an enjoyable treasure-hunt aspect, a Where's Waldo detective thrill. Once we started looking for eyes, we found them everywhere, glinting at us, winking from every page.

Long before the blinding of Oedipus or Gloucester, the language of vision and its opposite was preparing us, consciously or unconsciously, for those violent mutilations. It asked us to consider what it meant to be clear-sighted or obtuse, short-sighted or prescient, to heed the signs and warnings, to see or deny what was right in front of one's eyes. Teiresias, Oedipus, Goneril, Kent—all of them could be defined by the sincerity or falseness with which they mused or ranted on the subject of literal or metaphorical blindness.

Tracing those patterns and making those connections was fun. Like cracking a code that the playwright had embedded in the text, a riddle that existed just for me to decipher. I felt as if I were engaged in some intimate communication with the writer, as if the ghosts of Sophocles and Shakespeare had been waiting patiently all those centuries for a bookish sixteen-year-old to come along and find them.

"PISA is a triennial survey of the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds. It is the product of collaboration between participating countries and economies through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and draws on leading international expertise to develop valid comparisons across countries and cultures.

More than 400 000 students from 57 countries making up close to 90% of the world economy took part in PISA 2006. The focus was on science but the assessment also included reading and mathematics and collected data on student, family and institutional factors that could help to explain differences in performance. This report summarises the main findings."

I am always enthusiastic about the effort to measure that which is important (like reading) and therefore scrutinize reports such as these for what they might tell us. On the other hand, having authored, administered or participated in many such multinational studies, I am also very alert to issues of data integrity and comparability (are apples being compared to apples) and therefore remain cautiously skeptical about what they really can actually tell us.

In this PISA study, unfortunately, it appears that the USA did not participate in the reading section of the study. One item in particular, though, grabbed my attention.

Across the OECD area, reading performance generally remained flat between PISA 2000 and PISA 2006. This needs to be seen in the context of significant rises in expenditure levels. Between 1995 and 2004 expenditure per primary and secondary student increased by 39% in real terms, on average across OECD countries.

Time and again we have seen within the USA that, above a certain minimum, increased expenditures do not particularly correlate with improved results. Given the disparate nature of American culture and the profound freedom of choice experienced here, in education as in many other arenas, compared to other countries, it is interesting to see that this lack of correlation is true internationally as well.

Another study, this one from Scholastic, 2008 Kids & Family Reading Report and subtitled Reading in the 21st Century: Turning the Page with Technology.

I approach with my customary caution about any survey or comparative study. Pertinent details for this study are:

"In 2008, Scholastic and Yankelovich conducted a survey to examine the factors shaping children's relationship with reading now, and as we progress through the 21st century.

The key findings of the research, based on interviews with 501 children age 5-17 and their parents or guardians (1000+ total respondents) in 25 cities across the country"

While there is a reasonable amount of statement of the obvious, there are, as almost always there are, some interesting titbits.

I am not at all surprised to find the report confirming that:

High frequency readers are five times more likely than low frequency readers to say reading is extremely or very important (94% vs.18%).

On the other hand, here some interesting pieces picked randomly:

About nine in ten kids agree that they need to be strong readers to get into a good college and to get a good job.

Three in four agree that things will be "much harder" when they are grown if they are not strong
readers.

These sentiments do not vary significantly according to a child's age or gender.

High and moderate frequency readers are far more likely to read books than other printed materials.

Low frequency readers are far more likely to read magazines than books or other printed
materials.

"There aren't enough really good books for boys/girls my age." 55% Total Agree among Kids

Among children age 9-17, "having trouble finding books that I like" is among the top reasons for not reading more books for fun.

Boys are more likely than girls to have trouble finding books they like

Kids are nearly twice as likely as their parents (26% vs. 14%) to say having trouble finding books they like is a reason kids do not read more books for fun.

I thought these findings were especially pertinent.

Parents overwhelmingly view reading as the most important skill a child needs to develop; yet parents with older children believe this to a lesser degree.

Eighty-two percent of parents say they wish their child would read more books for fun.

Parents who read books for fun daily are six times more likely than low frequency reading parents to have kids who read for fun daily.

Reading at home starts young for some, but not all, children. About half of all parents begin reading to their children before their first birthday.

The percent of children who are read to daily drops from 38% among 5-8 year olds to 23% among 9-11 year olds - the same time when kids' daily reading for fun starts to decrease.

Parents employ several tactics to encourage kids to read more, such as giving books as gifts,
using movies or TV shows based on books, or encouraging kids to go online and extend the
reading experience. Parents of high frequency readers employ more tactics than parents of low
frequency readers.

Parents are a key source of books suggestions for their children, yet nearly half of all parents say they have a hard time finding information about books their child would enjoy reading.

The whole thing is worth a perusal.

Evaluation of the School Readiness of Parent-Child Home Program Participants: Abstract of the New York University Study of Five Long Island School Districts

"Reach Out and Read (ROR) is a national non-profit organization that promotes early literacy by giving new books to children and advice to parents about the importance of reading aloud in pediatric exam rooms across the nation."

They sponsored a study released in December, 2007 that provides some interesting statistics nationally and on a state-by-state basis regarding reading results. The Executive Summary is well worth reading and it is almost impossible not to examine the results for your particular state. Some insight and lots of interesting nuggets.

Reading Across the Nation: A Chartbook

They describe the study as follows:

Reading Across the Nation is designed as a resource for policymakers and professionals who are working to optimize the early language and literacy experiences of young children. By presenting "reading snapshots" for each state, with comparative rankings on literacy indicators, this chartbook will be a useful tool for policy makers and program planners as they consider how to make investments in the early years to enhance literacy and language development. The charts provide detailed state by state information about whether parents are meeting the basic recommendation of daily reading aloud to their children.

Dr. John Miller conducts an annual study of which cities in America are the most literate based on array of publicly available information. Some of the rankings just don't ring true based on my personal experience of travelling to many of these cities - and yet. Data exists to challenge our experiential assumptions. An interesting study. The most recent study is America's Most Literate Cities, 2006.

An article in the July 21, 2008 New Yorker discussing the role of Anne Carroll Moore in the early evolution of children's books. The title of the article is The Lion and the Mouse.

The most recent report covering reading patterns and trends in the US for the past twenty years. The most recent survey of data is from 2002 and the report can be obtained from the NEA site as a download or by ordering for free through their site.

Some nuggets from the report which had broadly negative trends to report:

From the Chairman, Dana Gioia, of the National Endowment for the Arts, "Reading is not a timeless, universal capability. Advanced literacy is a specific intellectual skill and social habit that depends on a great many educational, cultural, and economic factors. As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent minded. These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose."

Executive summary: "Literature reading is fading as a meaningful activity, especially among younger people. If one believes that active and engaged readers lead richer intellectual lives than non-readers and that a well-read citizenry is essential to a vibrant democracy, the decline of literary reading calls for serious action."

Chapter 2: "literary readers are nearly three times as likely to attend a performing arts event, almost four times as likely to visit an art museum, over two-and-a-half times as likely to do volunteer or charity work, over one-and-a-half times as likely to attend sporting events, and over one-and-a-half times as likely to participate in sports activities. In fact, people who read large numbers of books tend to have hte highest levels of participation in other activities, especially arts activities."

Chapter 4: "Between 1985 and 2000, annual consumer spending on television, radios, and sound equipment increased by 68%, from $371 per household in 1985 to $622 in 2000. In comparison, annual spending on reading increased by only 4%, from $141 per household in 1985 to $146 in 2000."

Key Figures on Cultural Participation in the European Union, by M. Skaliotis, EUROSTAT

A very interesting document showing the huge variability within the European Union of reading as a cultural activity. It is interesting that the north/south (beer/wine, cold/warm) divide is evident in these statistics as well. The highest levels of reading on virtually all measures are in northwestern Europe. Some interesting nuggets:

As measured by the percentage of the population not having read a book in the past year, the lowest levels of reading are: Portugal (67% not having read a book in the past year) Belgium (58%), Spain (54%) and Greece (53%). Across the European Union (EU), 42% of the population had not read a book in the prior year.

The highest rates of reading (as measured by any books read in the prior year) were clocked in by Sweden (72%), Finland (66%), the UK (63%) and Denmark (55%). Surprisingly to me, Germany and France were only at 40%.

Overall book reading rate in Europe (all books - pleasure, work, study) was 45% in 2001. The comparable figure for the US was 57%.

A similar gender imbalance (women reading more than men) is prevalent in Europe as it is in the US. Europe's ratio of Female to Male reading being 51% to 40% as measured by books read for pleasure (i.e. not for work or study). In the US the comparable figure is 55% to 38%.

Newspaper reading appears to still be thriving in Europe with 46% of the population reading a newspaper every day. While book and newspaper reading is generally closely correlated in the statistics (for example top scoring book reader Sweden is also the top newspaper reading country with 78% of the population reading a paper every day) there are a couple of exceptions. Interestingly, a low book reading country like Germany (40%) has 65% of the population reading a newspaper everyday.

Lots of great research and statistics at theNational Institure for Literacyalong with useful materials.

The US Census Bureau can be a fascinating font of information about this incredibly diverse country and it is amazing what nooks and crannies they have statistics on, including books and reading.

An article from the UK Times, July 24, 2008, Authors Unite Against Drive for Toddler Literacy by Nicola Woolcock.

As the research increasingly seems to indicate that much of a child's future literacy, academic and economic success are determined by the values and behaviors they absorb in the first five years of life before they even arrive in school, the capacity of government to intervene successfully becomes much more challenging. Even in a country such as the UK, it is interesting to see the response to some of the initial efforts along this path.

An article by Myron Magnet, What Use is Literature?, in the Summer 2003, edition of City Journal.

Magnet makes the argument for engaged literacy over the dessicated enthusiasms of some cultural critics.

Literature is a conversation across the ages about our experience and our nature, a conversation in which, while there isn't unanimity, there is a surprising breadth of agreement. Literature amounts, in these matters, to the accumulated wisdom of the race, the sum of our reflections on our own existence. It begins with observation, with reporting, rendering the facts of our inner and outer reality with acuity sharpened by imagination. At its greatest, it goes on to show how these facts have coherence and, finally, meaning. As it dramatizes what actually happens to concrete individuals trying to shape their lives at the confluence of so many imperatives, it presents us with concrete and particular manifestations of universal truths. For as the greatest authors know, the universal has to be embodied in the particular—where, as it is enmeshed in the complexity and contradictoriness of real experience, it loses the clarity and lucidity that only abstractions can possess.

In this month's edition of The Atlantic, there is an article by Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, worrying about the impact Google has on our reading and ways of thinking. It is an erudite and engaging article but somewhat frustrating - where's the beef?

Carr starts out with a disquisition on how Google and the internet seem to be changing how people think, not just metaphorically but in their practices. After a few quotes and anecdotal citations of his own experience and that of others, though, he then shifts to a discussion of some other historically significant technology changes such as the impact of time pieces, industrial standardization and efficiency, and finally a little about the goal of Google in their pursuit of the perfect search engine.

He has the grace to anticipate the criticisms of being a Luddite and fearing that which is simply new. My frustration is that I wish he would find an argument and stick with it. Is the internet and Google changing your behaviors and capacity for sustained concentration? Then make that case. Do you want to argue the pros and cons of historical technology shifts? Then follow that argument through. It is as if Carr is writing his article in a fashion that bolsters his argument that over-reliance on the internet reduces ones capacity for focused argument and contemplation and leads one to hop all over the place, buzzing about but never alighting.

Carr begins to wrap up his essay with a citation from Plato's Phaedrus in which Socrates worries about the implications of writing as a "technology" for information capture and transmission. We are left almost with an implication of a Greek tragedy, we are caught in the grip of fate and will suffer unknown consequences.

Free will seems to have been abandoned. While this is a graceful essay, entertaining, and a fresh jolt in making one consider a topic, it does seem to leave out any consideration of free will. All new technologies open up the potential for human nature to be amplified for good or for ill. Can the pathways and crevasses of the internet be a corrosive locale that corrupts our capacity to concentrate and reflect deeply on issue large and small? Absolutely!

Are we fated to irreversibly cascade down that maelstrom? Absolutely not.

With three children in or entering their teen years, I am fascinated by both the potential and dangers I see in how they are acculturalizing to the internet. I have been using the internet for business purposes since it's initial evolution and have seen its huge potential. But we are at that juncture where all that potential is spilling into a broader societal context and we have few cultural, technological or legal frameworks to anticipate quite how this will play out in the next couple of decades.

What I am confident of us that we do have free will. This article smacks of those laments twenty years ago when voice messaging came along in offices and people complained about the loss of personal connection. Or of the still current jeremiads against the "avalanche" of e-mails and how that is destroying one's capabilities to focus and prioritize.

These are all tools. We almost always figure out how to use them productively. It might in the 1910s and 1920s, with rutted roads and Mr. Toad drivers, and cars breaking down and operating in (mal)functioning ways, have been impossible to anticipate the day when literally hundreds of thousands of drivers zoom along at sixty miles an hour, a few feet apart and with statistically minimal accidents. But we did get from there to here. So will we with the internet and Google and many of the chicken little concerns will seem yet again to be ill-founded panic attacks.

We choose to allow ourselves to be distracted or not.

A pdf document by Dr. Todd R. Risley describing the results of the in-depth research he and his co-researcher, B. Hart, conducted in order to understand what happens in the everyday life of a child with particular focus on the aspects related to language acquisition.

Fascinating.

Here is an extended interview with Dr. Risley in which the research is explored in greater depth.

How Should One Read a Book? by Virginia Woolf

Elizabeth Cosgriff has an article in Open Spaces Quarterly that provides a thumbnail sketch of the history, purpose and past winners of the Newbery Award.

43% of the population read no books for pleasure in the prior 12 months. That figure is for 2002. More recent studies for the US that I have seen all hover around the 50% mark not having read a book in the prior 12 months. In Europe the corresponding figure tends to average 55% but with marked national and regional variations.

While overall voluntary reading has been declining for a number of years, the most marked declines are among the younger demographics. Between 1992 and 2002, voluntary reading declined from 59.8% to 51% for 18-24 year olds and from 63.8% to 58.4% for 25-34 year olds. Remember, this is a measure of people that read at least a single book.

All demographics showed an increase in the habit of daily reading to children in their household, increasing from 53% to 58% between 1993 and 2001. Households with the mother having a college degree education or higher (about 25% of the population) had the highest rates of daily reading to children at 73%.

Each week for the past two years The Daily Telegraph's literary editor has asked a contributor to name and describe his or her "Book of the Century", and today the series concludes with Arthur C. Clarke's choice. The full selection invites comparison with a list drawn up by The Telegraph a century ago; we print both here.

The comparison cannot, however, be exact. All the books chosen in 1899 were fiction - the paper offered its readers the "100 Best Novels in the World", selected by the editor "with the assistance of Sir Edwin Arnold, K. C. I. E, H. D. Traill, D. C. L, and W. L. Courtney, LL. D.".

The modern list includes poetry, plays, history, diaries, philosophy, economics, memoirs, biography and travel writing. It is certainly eclectic, ranging from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, selected by David Sylvester, to The Wind in the Willows, chosen by John Bayley, and Down with Skool, Wendy Cope's Book of the Century.

So what should you do when a child throws a tantrum? Many parents, determined not to be cruel or counterproductive, latch on to pre-approved language from books. Walk through a Manhattan playground and you’ll hear parents responding to their dirt-throwing, swing-stealing offspring with a studied flatness. A toddler whirling into a rage is quietly instructed, "Use your words." A preschooler who clocks his classmate is offered the vaguely Zen incantation "Hands are not for hitting." A kid demanding a Popsicle is given a bland demurral: "I’m sorry, but I don’t respond to whining." (The preferred vocal inflection is that of a customer-service representative informing an irate caller that the warranty has, indeed, expired.) The brusque imperative "Say 'please'!" has been supplanted by the mildest of queries: "Is there a nicer way to say that?" The efficacy of this clinical approach has not been confirmed by science, but it certainly feels scientific, in part because the parents conduct themselves as if their child were the subject of a peer-reviewed experiment.

In this confrontation-averse age of parenting, in which the "escalation" of emotions is considered a mark of failure, a favorite way of inculcating discipline is the reading of picture books. The language of a good children’s story is precise and consistent, offering a genial way for parents to address misbehavior. The Bank Street Bookstore, in Manhattan, now has a section called "Special Needs," with hundreds of picture books categorized by theme, such as "Manners” and “School" and "Siblings."

Results from this meta-analysis of the impacts of home and parent programs on the literacy skills of young children indicate that these interventions yield a moderate to large effect on oral language outcomes and general cognitive abilities. These effects appear to be robust to variations in children’s ages and demographic characteristics of families. Additionally, the effects of these programs on children’s oral language skills were consistent across measures of simple vocabulary and measures of more complex oral language skills.

Parents were asked how important they thought it was to teach their children certain things to prepare them for kindergarten. Sixty-two percent of children had parents who reported is [sic] was essential to teach their children about sharing, 56 percent had parents who reported it was essential to teach the alphabet, 54 percent had parents who reported it was essential to teach numbers, 45 percent had parents who reported it was essential to teach them how to read, and 41 percent had parents who reported it was essential to show them how to hold a pencil (table 3).

Parents were asked about the frequency with which they or other family members read to the child in the past week. Fifty-five percent of children were read to every day, 28 percent were read to three or more times in the past week, 13 percent were read to once or twice in the past week, and 3 percent were not read to at all in the past week (table 4). For children who were read to in the past week, the mean daily reading time was about 21 minutes.

Reported on a scale of 0 to 500, national average reading scores of 4th- and 8th-graders were higher in 2007 than in 1992, by 4 and 3 points, respectively (table 123). These 2007 scores were also higher than the 2005 scores. The reading score of 12th-graders was 6 points lower in 2005 (the most recent assessment year for grade 12) than in 1992. In the most recent assessment, females at each grade level outscored their male counterparts. For example, 12th-grade females scored 13 points higher than males in 2005. Average scores were higher in 2007 than in 1992 for White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander 4th-graders (ranging from 6 to 16 points) and for White, Black, and Hispanic 8th-graders (ranging from 5 to 7 points), while scores were lower in 2005 than in 1992 for White, Black, and Hispanic 12th-graders (ranging from 5 to 7 points).

The 2007 main NAEP reading assessment of states found that the average reading proficiency of public school 4th- and 8th-graders varied across participating jurisdictions (the 50 states, the Department of Defense overseas and domestic schools, and the District of Columbia). For 4th-graders in public schools, the U.S. average score was 220, with average scores in participating jurisdictions ranging from 197 in the District of Columbia to 236 in Massachusetts (table 121). For 8th-graders in public schools, the U.S. average score was 261, with average scores in participating jurisdictions ranging from 241 in the District of Columbia to 273 in the Department of Defense schools, Massachusetts, and Vermont (table 122).

This research focused on what parents do rather than their status. Emphasis was on those ongoing processes considered to be alterable as part of the teaching-learning process. Of the six home processes examined, independence and responsibility, diverse leaisure activities, and, even more significantly, parental encouragement of reading correlated most highly with leisure reading, controlling for gender and socioeconomic status.

The active involvement of children in hobbies, family and individual activities, and trips and outings (whether strictly educational or recreational) was positively related to leisure reading. Children from these homes tended to be involved in more of everything - sports, hobbies, and reading - indicating that rather than displace reading, such activities might nurture reading in a dynamic interactive setting.

Reading is a construction of meaning from written text. It is an active, cognitive, and affective process.

Background knowledge and prior experience are crtical to the reading process.

Social interaction is essential in learning to read.

Reading and writing develop together.

Reading involves complex thinking.

Environments rich in literacy experiences, resources, and models facilitate reading development.

Engagement in the reading task is key in successfully learning to read.

Children's understanding of print are not the same as adults' understanding.

Children develop phonemic awareness and knowledge of phonics through a variety of literacy opportunities, models, and deomonstrations.

Children learn successful reading strategies in the context of real reading.

Children learn best when teachers emply a variety of strategies to model and demonstrate reading knowledge, strategy, and skills.

Children need the opportunity to read, read, read.

Monitoring the development of reading processes is vital to student success.

Increase students' access to informational text.
Increase the time students spend working with informational text in instructional activities.
Explicitly teach comprehension strategies.
Create opportunities for students to use informational text for authentic purposes.

You can't infer a child's reading habits from tests of comprehension or critical reading, nor vice versa.

Region: What have you found in your own research about the effects of schooling on test scores?

Heckman: Very strong effects, much stronger than what Herrnstein and Murray claim in their book [The Bell Curve]. In a paper published last year with Kathleen Mullen and Karsten Hansen in the Journal of Econometrics, we found substantial effects of an extra year's schooling on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, the same test they used. The point is that the test they used is an achievement test. It embodies knowledge that people acquire through experience.

Region: So it's not nature versus nurture, but rather nature with nurture.

Heckman: Exactly. It's an interaction. Epigenetics is the field that studies this. There are a lot of recent books and scholarly articles on this topic. I was just at the National Institutes of Health last weekend, and part of the discussion we had there was about this. It's a fascinating field.

The people who favor genetic explanations of social phenomena need to be careful about two things. The methods they use for determining heritability assume additivity. They don't allow for interaction. Secondly, when one does the standard additive analysis for different socioeconomic groups, one finds that the socioeconomic status critically affects the so-called heritability coefficient.

A paper published in Psychological Science (2003) by Eric Turkheimer [et al.] shows very strong family background effects on a number of heritability coefficients. Richer families are providing ways for children to override some defective genes and enhance those genes that are productive. We are just beginning to understand these mechanisms. They are very important.

Heckman: There's a very strong bias among economists against some of the basic findings of the child development literature. Many economists assume that family effects operate primarily through cognitive child ability. A lot of formal economic models view the development process solely in terms of raising IQs. Or else they assume that IQ is purely heritable. Neither view is correct.

Enriched early intervention programs targeted to disadvantaged children have had their biggest effect on noncognitive skills: motivation, self-control and time preference. We know that there's a scientific basis for this finding. The prefrontal cortex, which is a center of these noncognitive skills, matures late. The executive function, the very definition of ourselves as people, the way we motivate ourselves, these things are malleable until quite late stages - into the 20s, according to research by neuroscientists. This means that in principle we can modify these behaviors. Noncognitive skills are powerfully predictive of a number of socioeconomic measures (crime, teenage pregnancy, education and the like) as I show in a recent paper with Jora Stixrud and Sergio Urzua.

. . . The standard model developed by Gary Becker and Nigel Tomes implicitly assumes that early and late childhood investments are perfect substitutes, that one can make up later for what disadvantaged families neglect early. They also assume a single market skill.

For the study of early childhood investments, these are bad assumptions. First, skills are multiple in nature. A proper accounting of human skills recognizes both cognitive and noncognitive skills. Second, investments raise the stock of later skills through self-productivity and complementarity. Early advantages reinforce each other through self-productivity and complementarity, reducing the cost of future learning. Because of these life-cycle dynamics, the substitution between early and late investments in children is low. The most economically efficient way to remediate the disadvantage caused by adverse family environments is to invest in children when they are young.

We have found that for severely disadvantaged children, there are no levels of later childhood skill investments that can bring the children to a level of social and economic performance attainable from well-targeted early investments. We find that both social and emotional skills are essential in producing successful people. These findings change the way economists think about the human capital formation process.

If we don't provide disadvantaged young children with the proper environments to foster cognitive and noncognitive skills, we'll create a class of people without such skills, without motivation, without the ability to contribute to the larger society nearly as much as they could if they'd been properly nurtured from an early age. Neglecting the early years creates an underclass that is arguably growing in the United States. The family is the major source of human inequality in American society.

Most macroeconomists think of human capital as education, measured by years of school. Or if they're a little more sophisticated, they measure human capital by test scores like IQ or an achievement test. Neglected are all the noncognitive abilities that are produced by healthy families. Deficiencies in these skills can be partially remediated, as we know from the early intervention programs. Not completely remediated, but certainly gaps can be closed. The things we used to think of as soft and fuzzy have a real effect on behavior.

If a child starts out with low levels of cognitive and noncognitive ability, it becomes much less profitable to invest in the young adult. That's the notion of complementarity. If a child has a low level of ability at age 17, then productivity of investment in that person is much lower than it is in somebody who has ability and motivation. The major contributors to the college-going gap by child family income class have to do with child ability. Richer families are much more likely to send their kids to college, but once one conditions on the ability of the child at age 17, virtually all of the income effect goes away. It's all about the ability that's embodied in the child from a lifetime of early investments. So families play a huge role, but it's in making the kid college-ready. It's human ability, or rather, abilities. This is one place where Adam Smith was wrong, actually. He has a passage in The Wealth of Nations which I used to believe and used to quote in classes. And then I realized that Smith was dead wrong.

Region: As well as dead; he won't be able to respond to your critique.

Heckman: You're quite right. [Laughter] Dimitriy Masterov and I actually visited his tomb last year in Edinburgh, where we presented our work on Scottish skill formation.

But anyway, Smith says people are basically born the same and at age 8 one can't really see much difference among them. But then starting at age 8, 9, 10, they pursue different fields, they specialize and they diverge. In his mind, the butcher and the lawyer and the journalist and the professor and the mechanic, all are basically the same person at age 8.

This is wrong. IQ is basically formed by age 8, and there are huge differences in IQ among people. Smith was right that people specialize after 8, but they started specializing before 8. On the early formation of human skill, I think Smith was wrong, although he was right about many other things. And Dimitriy and I said that in the speeches we gave while in Scotland last year. We wanted to be a little titillating. But I think these observations on human skill formation are exactly why the job training programs aren't working in the United States and why many remediation programs directed toward disadvantaged young adults are so ineffective. And that's why the distinction between cognitive and noncognitive skill is so important, because a lot of the problem with children from disadvantaged homes is their values, attitudes and motivations.

Cognitive skills such as IQ can't really be changed much after ages 8 to 10. But with noncognitive skills there's much more malleability. That's the point I was making earlier when talking about the prefrontal cortex. It remains fluid and adaptable until the early 20s. That's why adolescent mentoring programs are as effective as they are. Take a 13-year-old. You're not going to raise the IQ of a 13-year-old, but you can talk the 13-year-old out of dropping out of school. Up to a point you can provide surrogate parenting.

So, coming back to job training and other interventions targeted toward disadvantaged adolescents, mainstream discussions miss the basic economics of the skill formation process. When we understand how that works, that skills build on each other, it's very common-sensical. It's not just IQ, or achievement measured by a test. That's very hard for many economists to understand. There are interactions among IQ, cognitive ability as measured by an achievement test and noncognitive ability.

This document pulls together existing research about the impact of literacy on five areas in a person's life: economic well-being, aspirations, family life, health and civic/cultural engagement. It presents overwhelming evidence that literacy has a significant relationship with a person’s happiness and success. It gives a clear indication of the dangers of poor literacy and also the benefits of improving literacy for the individual, the community, the workforce and the nation.

The evidence about the benefits of parents being involved in their children’s education in general, and their children’s literacy activities in particular, is unequivocal. For example, research shows that parental involvement in their children’s learning positively affects the child’s performance at school, both in primary (Jeynes, 2005) and secondary school (Jeynes, 2007). The impact is the same regardless of ethnic background, family income, maternal level of education, or child’s gender (Deaher et al., 2006; Jeynes, 2005). There are also numerous studies that have shown that children who grow up in a stimulating home environment – one which has a great emphasis on learning opportunities – do better academically, regardless of socio-economic background (e.g. van Steensel, 2006). According to Desforges and Abouchaar (2003), "parental involvement has a significant effect on children’s achievement and adjustment even after all other factors (such as social class, maternal education and poverty) have been taken out of the equation between children's aptitudes and their achievement".

In addition to higher academic achievement and greater cognitive competence, parental involvement leads to greater problem-solving skills, greater school enjoyment, better school attendance, fewer behavioural problems at school, and greater social and emotional development (Melhuish, Sylva, Sammons et al., 2001).

Swedes are big readers. In this country of nine million people, 58 million books were borrowed from libraries in 2008. More than 40 million books were sold in the same year. Books are on offer everywhere from supermarkets to gas stations and 83 per cent of Swedes have read one in the past 12 months. As book reading is generally regarded as an admirable pastime, there should be no reason to worry over the Swedes’ cultural habits.

UT's Bigler was one of the scholars heavily involved in the process of its creation. Bigler is an adamant proponent of desegregation in schools on moral grounds. "It's an enormous step backward to increase social segregation," she says. However, she also admitted that "in the end, I was disappointed with the amount of evidence social psychology could muster [to support it]. Going to integrated schools gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them."

I am not the only one alarmed by modern parental behavior. Randi Jacoby, a speech and language specialist in New York, recently told me in an e-mail message: "Parents have stopped having good communications with their young children, causing them to lose out on the eye contact, facial expression and overall feedback that is essential for early communication development.

"Young children require time and one-on-one feedback as they struggle to formulate utterances in order to build their language and cognitive skills. The most basic skills are not being taught by example, and society is falling prey to the quick response that our computer generation has become accustomed to.

"Parents need to be reminded of the significance of their communicative model."

Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the last seven years trying to find reliable, repeatable methods to improve self-control in children. When I spoke to her recently, she told me about a six-week-long experiment that she and some colleagues conducted in 2003 with 40 fifth-grade students at a school in Philadelphia.

"We did everything right," she told me: led the kids through self-control exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they started the program. But in fact, they did not: the children who had been through the intervention did no better on a variety of measures than a control group at the same school. "We looked at teacher ratings of self-control, we looked at homework completion, we looked at standardized achievement tests, we looked at G.P.A., we looked at whether they were late to class more," Duckworth explained. "We got zero effect on everything." Despite that failure, Duckworth says she is convinced that it is possible to boost executive function among children - she just thinks it will require a more complex and thoroughgoing program than the one that she and her colleagues employed. "It’s not impossible,” she concludes, “but it’s damn hard."

There are not yet firm experimental data that prove that Tools of the Mind works.

"In large part, our results can be explained by the fact that low-income children who attended higher-quality child care developed reading and math skills in early childhood that likely prepared them for later achievement in middle childhood," according to Eric Dearing, associate professor of applied developmental psychology at Boston College and the study's lead author.

It is said that the young Alcibiades, visiting a grammar school around 430 B.C., asked the teacher for a volume of Homer and, hearing there was none, struck the hapless teacher and left. Ancient geographers like Strabo thought to learn their art from the blind bard; Stoics studied what they considered Homer's didactic allegories. Military commanders pored over his lays so as to avoid Agamemnon's errors and mimic Odysseus's guile. Socrates called Homer the "best and most divine" of poets, and Plato's dialogues, for all their censure, refer to him, by one estimate, 331 times. Plutarch claims that Aristotle himself prepared an edition of the Iliad for his pupil Alexander, who kept the book "with his dagger under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge." A 2nd-century B.C. marble relief depicts Homer as Father of Humankind, crowned by Time and Space themselves.

It is not enough to teach children how to read, we must, in addition, teach children to want to read.

Considering the data (and we all know it is about the DATA these days), boys score lower than girls on standardized reading tests and report less motivation and interest in reading. I often wonder how much of the disengagement many boys have for reading stems from classroom instruction designed by predominately female English teachers, though. When every class novel and reading activity filters solely through the predilections and worldview of a female teacher, boys can become demotivated and believe that their personal interests and opinions are not valued in English class. It is clear that when selecting books to read aloud, purchasing books for a library, or designing lessons, we must be mindful of the boys we teach and our latent prejudices about the reading material we offer to students.

Boys want the same thing that every reader wants--to open a book and find themselves in the pages. As teachers, invested in creating readers, we owe it to our boys to help them find such books.

Reflecting on my own experiences, it probably helps that I appreciate the same books many boys do. I love fantasy epics and authors like Roland Smith and Eoin Colfer. I am just as likely to pull Scott Westerfeld's new steampunk science fiction novel, Leviathan, out of my bag and recommend it as I am to suggest a title like Helen Frost's The Braid, a book geared toward girls. I don't have strong gender preferences in what I read myself, so providing a balance in the books I recommend to students and choose for us to read together in class seems natural to me.

We create a crisis when we define readers along gender lines, and I think boy readers get a bad rap. They will read fiction, they will read books that explore emotional issues, and they will read books that are longer than 100 pages. They will read. Instead of blaming our boys for their gender, or lowering our expectations for their literacy development, we should scrutinize any system where boys are hailed for their achievement in science and math class and allowed to define themselves as nonreaders

It's not like her to put a professional foot wrong. The much-loved Wilson has, after all, sold more than 25 million books, was until recently the most borrowed author in British libraries, and is a Dame (the first children's author to be so honoured). But last year she dared to suggest that too much freedom and "being invited to engage with ideas that they simply don't have the maturity to deal with" meant that childhood today was over by the age of 11.

One aspect of modern childhood she finds particularly perplexing is the way children have so much freedom in many ways – and in others, none at all. "In most loving families, if a child has a point, they're allowed to make it; they're allowed to argue with their parents. Whereas, in my generation, you'd get a clap on your head if you dared argue with your dad.

"On the other hand, they aren't allowed to play out in the streets any more. They don't play imaginary games. When I was at school, everyone in the playground up to a certain age played imaginary games. They were quite prosaic – cowboys and indians, or the Famous Five. Now, apart from very little kids with teddies being offered biscuits, they don't play imaginatively with each other. Adults are a part of children's lives all the time now. It can be good to protect and encourage children, but it stops children learning to get along with other children."

The first wide-scale research into the use of whole books in literacy teaching in the UK has revealed that a quarter of primary school children are reading just one whole book a year in class. Incredibly, 12 per cent of primary school teachers said they have never read a complete book with their class. If the findings were extrapolated to all primaries across the country it would mean nearly 600,000 children never read a book in class with their teacher, while over 1.1 million would only study one whole book a year in class.

Imagine, then, a dystopian horror tale in which virtually all books from the past were destroyed.

At back-to-school night last fall, I was prepared to ask my daughter's eighth-grade language arts teacher about something that had been bothering me immensely: the rise of Accelerated Reader, a "reading management" software system that helps teachers track student reading through computerized comprehension tests and awards students points for books they read based on length and difficulty, as measured by a scientifically researched readability rating. When the teacher announced during the class presentation that she refused to use the program, I almost ran up and hugged her.

And, you have not one child, but three, all different ages, all different temperaments, all different interests. Do you read different books to each child individually? That adds up to 45 minutes a day. And how do you know what book to read to each one? Do you read to all three at once? What if your three year old gets up and walks away in the middle of the story? And what if the baby starts crying? And what if your eight year old doesn't want to read "baby books" any more? And what if you've been working all day and you're so bone tired that you can't even keep your eyelids open to read?

I know. I understand. I've been there, too, with three kids, two jobs, and a husband whose work requires him to travel extensively. So here's the bad news. The best thing you can do to help your child succeed in reading and in school is to read aloud to them, period, the end. Why? Because you, taking the time to read aloud to your children, especially when you are so very busy, shows them that you think words and reading and books are very important. Reading aloud to children enriches their vocabularies, models reading behaviors, expands their emotional expression, and introduces them to story, history, folklore, and culture, enlarging their world. They love you. When you take the time to read to your kids, their love for you spills over. It encompasses all that you do together, so they will automatically begin to love books and language, too. And kids who love books and language definitely have a leg up on everyone else when they start school.

Search Institute has identified the following building blocks of healthy development - known as Developmental Assets - that help young children grow up healthy, caring, and responsible.

But if you go to the Brooklyn Public Library seeking a copy of "Tintin au Congo," Hergé’s second book in a series, prepare to make an appointment and wait days to see the book.

"It's not for the public," a librarian in the children’s room said this month when a patron asked to see it.

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean -
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

and

The limerick's callous and crude,
Its morals distressingly lewd;
It's not worth the reading
By persons of breeding -
It's designed for us vulgar and rude.

When we publish cheaply illustrated books of children's poetry full of bad rhymes or sticky-sweetness or flat prose rhythms we call "free verse," we express a secret contempt for the form. We tell the child, in so many words: You see? It really doesn't matter -- let's just shovel it in.

Whatever the art form being presented to children it must be vibrant, skillful, mysterious, thrilling. The child absorbs a work of art as adults seldom do -- takes it in, I mean, with her whole being. Images from childhood form the adult's vision. We remember in the deep secret places of the psyche the "great green room" of Margaret Wise Brown's "Goodnight Moon," or Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," or William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say," or Dr. Seuss's "Cat in the Hat." The language of childhood is our purest language -- it may be the last truly shared cultural language we have. We must not debase it -- least of all in our poetry.

For what happens when we, young and old, read imaginative literature? We withdraw. Novelist Philip Roth puts it well: "The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it's not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading." The noise to which he refers is that emanating from "a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control" us.

These deal with the facts of life, and facts are most important things, but fancies are important too, and the fancies are not much cultivated today.

It is doubtful if fancy can be cultivated directly, it is too subtle and elusive, it must grow of itself, but conditions can be made conducive or the reverse. To be conducted through the realms of poetry and romance by a grown-up person, as one of a class of children all with differing needs and perceptions, at a given rate of speed, is not conducive to such growth.

To gain the greatest amount out of a book, one must read it as inclination leads; some parts are to be hurried over quickly, others read slowly and many times over; the mind will take what it needs, and dwell upon it, and make it its own.

Its connotations are really what make a book of use in stimulating the imagination. As a musical note is richer the more overtones it has, so a book is richer the more it ramifies into trains of thought. But there must be time and space for the thought to develop; the reader must not be interrupted by impertinent comments and alien suggestions.

At first the child merely knows that this story or that story is interesting, that certain other stories are not interesting, he does not attempt to analyse why. Later he will make his first true criticism; he will say, 'It does not seem real,' or 'Nobody would do so.' He has detected bad writing; his imagination refuses to give credence to what its instinct declares not to be true. Gradually these criticisms of matter are added to by criticisms of form, and we have 'Nobody would talk like that.'

What makes the child think that nobody would do thus and so, or that nobody would talk in such and such a way? Partly his knowledge of life as he has lived it, of course. Though he has lived a very small life and his experiences have necessarily been few, yet through the life of his imagination he has been able to live much more, he has gained a conception of life far beyond anything that he has ever experienced.

If one can imagine oneself a child of twelve years old denuded of any knowledge or idea of anything except what he can have known or seen in his daily life, one will at once see how much more meagre his conceptions would be than is actually the case. Therefore what makes the child think that this or that thing that he is reading about is false is the knowledge that he has gained through his imagination.

The power of judgment is like water running up hill; water cannot rise higher than its own level, and judgment cannot go beyond the experience which informs it. To be sure that the judgment is sound, the school in which the experience is gained must be true to life. Only the best in literature and art is this, and it is with the best in literature and art that our children must be familiar.

There is no education like self-education, and no stimulus to the imagination so good as that which it gives itself when allowed to roam through the pent-up stores of the world's imaginings at will.

There is a class of people known to all librarians as 'browsers.' They wander from shelf to shelf, now reading here, now there. Sometimes dipping into ten books in the hour, sometimes absorbed in one for the whole day. If we look back to our childhood we shall see how large a part 'browsing' had in our education. One book suggested another, and as we finished one we knew the next that was waiting to be begun. They stretched on and on in a delightful and never-ending vista. The joy of those hours when we sat cross-legged' on the floor, or perched on the top of a ladder, a new world hidden behind the covers of every book within reach, and perfect liberty to open the covers and enter at will, can never be forgotten.

We talk about 'creating a demand for books' among the children of the masses, and about ' giving them the reading habit,' and the best way to do this is to have a well-stocked reading-room of good books, books for grown-up people as well as for children, and let the children have free access to the shelves. They will be found reading strange things often, strange from the point of view of the grown-up person, that is. But in most cases their instincts will be good guides, and they will read what is best for them.

We love and admire certain things rather inspite of what people say than because of it. We like to compare notes with some one who enjoys the same things that we do, but the real enjoyment was there before. Beauty cannot be proved as a mathematical problem can. If beauty is its own excuse for being, it is also its own teacher for perceiving. Contact with beautiful things creates a taste for the beautiful, if there is any taste to be created.