Flutterby™! : Books & education 2010-05-27 05:03:22.006459+00

Books & education

2010-05-27 05:03:22.006459+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Books in the home is as important as parents education in predicting the education level of children:

For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education). Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average.

Via Sensible Erection. Which probably actually isn't about the books but about the parents attitude towards knowledge and what sources they look to assimilate it from. I'll bet books in the home are inversely correlated with TV consumption. I wonder how this is going to change with the rise of e-reading...

That gets at one of my many complaints about eReading. I *like* looking at books. I like looking at other people's libraries, and think that letting someone look through my library (or even letting them know that I have a "library") can give them a lot of insight into what makes me tick. But how does that work with eReaders?

There's a lot of serendipity lost with eReaders / online books, and that's one of the reasons I still patronize physical bookstores. It's great being able to get things from amazon, but I have far fewer serendipitous finds while shopping there than I do while wandering around a shop full of dead trees. And no human interaction on amazon.

I'm a great example of this. I'm currently working on my PhD dissertation. Neither of my parents completed college (actually, my mother got her Associates last year - go Mom!). But we always had books - lots of them. I was also a military brat, which meant I had to move those books every couple years. As kids, we watched a lot of TV - or what the 3.5 channels provided. Mom was always reading while we watched TV. Books were always viewed as a form of entertainment.

But it's not a universal. Neither of my two siblings continued their academics after high school. But they both still read regularly.