At last . . .

As part of our effort to identify those activities which parents can undertake in the home that will likely predispose their children to becoming habitual and enthusiastic readers (Growing a Reading Culture - Just for Parents), I have for more than a year been searching for information about the number of books in the home and have always come up short. At last I have some answers. M.D.R. Evans, et al have published a paper (Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations) which provides some data, not just for the US but 26 other countries as well.

This is a very interesting report which validates much of the other research we had compiled on this issue. In Growing a Reading Culture - Just for Parents, we identified access to books as one of the five bedrock activities that have a material impact on children's predisposition towards reading. The answer regarding how many books the average American has in their home is - 112. The same number as the average for all twenty-seven countries in the study. Israel and Latvia come in at the top at 224 and 265 books in the average home. Mediterranean countries tend to be lower, as expected from other studies (in the 40-60 range), Scandinavian countries much higher (150-160), reflective of their much higher reading participation rates.

Only 3% of US homes indicate that they have no books, which is better than some of the indicative evidence I had seen. Still, nearly fifty percent of homes have fewer than 25 books in them. 18% of homes have more than 500 books.

Some of the interesting observations and conclusions from the study:

Where do libraries come from - who acquires a large library? The answer is unequivocal: a taste for books is largely inherited (Fig. 6 and Table A.8, column 7). Parents' library size is by far the dominant influence on one's own home library size, .62 in standardized terms (see also Crook, 1997a). Importantly, once other factors are taken into account, education, occupational status, and class are irrelevant. Prosperous people buy more books, although not a lot more.

[snip]

Thus it seems that scholarly culture, and the taste for books that it brings, flows from generation to generation largely of its own accord, little affected by education, occupational status, or other aspects of class.

[snip]

First, because scholarly culture provides skills and knowledge that are central to literacy and numeracy, and hence valuable in schools everywhere, it implies that parents' participation in scholarly culture will enhance children's educational attainment in all societies, net of the parents' formal education and social class (Hypothesis 1). As we have seen, the evidence strongly supports this hypothesis. Moreover it also suggests that social and economic policies have little effect on the advantages conferred by scholarly culture; instead, the advantage is large in all nations, at all times, under all political regimes.

Plus ca change . . .

Nicholas Lemann in the November 1997 Atlantic with his article, The Reading Wars. Plus ca change . . .

I'd like to offer three predictions arising from the California curriculum wars. First, efforts to establish greater quality control in public education, which will almost inevitably mean trying to impose more central authority over the advanced countries' most decentralized system of schooling, will go on constantly over the next few decades. Second, given that the traditional side is now winning the ongoing battle between traditional and progressive education, schools all over the country will be pressed hard by parents and politicians to move toward imparting skills and away from simply inculcating the joy of learning. Third, the longer the United States remains in its current peaceful and relatively prosperous condition, the more issues like school curricula, which politicians and the press aren't used to considering at any length, will come to the fore in American politics. Politics can be contentious and consequential without being about the adjudication of world affairs. Great clashes of ideas and interests can take place on the battleground of everyday life.

The Decay of Lying

The Decay of Lying: An Observation by Oscar Wilde, 1891 published in Intentions. In the form of a dialogue between two friends, it is really a vehicle for some witty and waspish literary criticisms on the part of Wilde. A sampling:

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One's individuality absolutely leaves one. And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch. Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching---that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.

[snip]

Please don't interrupt in the middle of a sentence. `He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability. This is no isolated instance that we are giving. It is simply one example out of many; and if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.'

[snip]

However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain you any further just here. I quite admit that modern novels have many good points. All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite unreadable.

[snip]

Consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.

On Buying Old Books

An essay by Charles S. Brooks, On Buying Old Books.

By some slim chance, reader, you may be the kind of person who, on a visit to a strange city, makes for a bookshop. Of course your slight temporal business may detain you in the earlier hours of the day. You sit with committees and stroke your profound chin, or you spend your talent in the market, or run to and fro and wag your tongue in persuasion. Or, if you be on a holiday, you strain yourself on the sights of the city, against being caught in an omission. The bolder features of a cathedral must be grasped to satisfy a quizzing neighbor lest he shame you later on your hearth, a building must be stuffed inside your memory, or your pilgrim feet must wear the pavement of an ancient shrine. However, these duties being done and the afternoon having not yet declined, do you not seek a bookshop to regale yourself?

Further -

I have in mind such a bookshop in Bath, England. It presents to the street no more than a decent front, but opens up behind like a swollen bottle. There are twenty rooms at least, piled together with such confusion of black passages and winding steps, that one might think that the owner himself must hold a thread when he visits the remoter rooms. Indeed, such are the obscurities and dim turnings of the place, that, were the legend of the Minotaur but English, you might fancy that the creature still lived in this labyrinth, to nip you between his toothless gums--for the beast grows old--at some darker corner. There is a story of the place, that once a raw clerk having been sent to rummage in the basement, his candle tipped off the shelf. He was left in so complete darkness that his fears overcame his judgment and for two hours he roamed and babbled among the barrels. Nor was his absence discovered until the end of the day when, as was the custom, the clerks counted noses at the door. When they found him, he bolted up the steps, nor did he cease his whimper until he had reached the comforting twilight of the outer world. He served thereafter in the shop a full two years and had a beard coming--so the story runs--before he would again venture beyond the third turning of the passage; to the stunting of his scholarship, for the deeper books lay in the farther windings.

There was such a bookstore in the cathedral town of Guildford, not too far from my parents' home in England. For years, every time I visited them, I made the effort to get over to Thorley's, not too dissimilar to the store described by Benson, until that awful visit when I found them to be having a going out of business sale. Such a sad event: but being a true buyer of books my sadness did not stop my acquiring a daunting armful of books.

In some of our national moods we would like schools to teach everything, but they cannot.

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.

The failure of our schools to create a literate society is sometimes excused on the grounds that the schools have been asked to do too much. They are asked, for example, to pay due regard to the demands of both local and national acculturation. They are asked to teach not only American history but also state and city history, driving, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, consumerism, carpentry, cooking, and other subjects. They are given the task of teaching information that is sometimes too rudimentary and sometimes too specialized. If the schools did not undertake this instruction, much of the information so provided would no doubt go unlearned. In some of our national moods we would like schools to teach everything, but they cannot. There is a pressing need for clarity about our educational priorities.

Such a citizen will, on the contrary, be a sort of universal man

Dukedom Large Enough by Michael Knox Beran in City Journal. An article length review of Kevin J. Hayes' The Road to Monticello. Jefferson was every bibliophiles patron president.

Jefferson alluded to the Greeks and Romans not only in his writing, but also in his architecture. Derivative pedantry? Servile tribute to the cultural supremacy of the Old World? Not quite. Classical standards were intimately involved in his vision of what America might become and what qualities of character might flourish here. Jefferson knew, from his reading of Thucydides, that the Greek idea of eutrapelia stood for a larger conception of civilized life: the root word means "graceful turning" (hence our idea of the "well-rounded" man), and it implied a beautiful versatility in action, what Matthew Arnold, in a lecture at Eton, called "a happy and gracious flexibility." A citizen so educated as to be able to "turn," easily and gracefully, from one task to another perhaps very different one, will not, Thucydides has Pericles say in the Funeral Oration, be idiotes, an idiot, imprisoned in a fragmentary part-life. Such a citizen will, on the contrary, be a sort of universal man, sufficiently broad-souled to contribute to the life of the city.

People who have never troubled to read his books

From Anthony Lawton's site, Rosemary Sutcliff, is this article by Sutcliff on Kipling. Well worth a read.

I like Sutcliff's plea that people know what they are talking about before they hurl abuse at writers of yesteryear. Too many of our contemporary culture critics are prone to besmirching the reputations of writers from long ago without actually having read them.

Rudyard Kipling died just when the old order was dying, and many of the things that he believed in were falling into disrepute; when Britain was beginning to be ashamed of having - or ever having had - an Empire. And so the charge of Jingoism was levelled at him, and has been levelled at him off and on ever since, by people who have never troubled to read his books with an open mind. I have even heard conscientious parents and school teachers doubting the rightness of giving certain of his books to their children, lest they should imbibe jingoistic ideas from them - particularly from Stalky and Co., the very book which contains, had those conscientious parents and teachers noticed it, the unforgettable portrait of the Jelly-Bellied Flagflapper.

Empire had not become a dirty word to Kipling, but he saw it in terms, not of dominion but of service. One of the extremely sound lessons he has for the child of to-day is that service is not something to be ashamed of. Another is that history is something to do with oneself. Most children tend to grow up seeing history in a series of small static pictures, all belonging to the past and with no communicating door between them and the present. The two Puck books, with their mingling of past and present in one corner of England must help them to feel it as a living and continuous process of which they themselves are a part, and so see their own times in better perspective than they might otherwise have done.

Yes, Rudyard Kipling still has an honourable place to fill in the ranks of children's writers, and it is a place which, without him, must remain empty, for nobody else can fill it.