The shelves in my office are overflowing with so many books that I’ve started hiding them other places around the house (the bathroom closest now has a complete set of the Harvard Classics).
My wife can’t understand why I need to keep buying even more books (and she doesn’t even know about the bathroom library yet) but now I have an excuse to justify my bibliophilism: The more books I have the better our kid will do in school.
After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.
“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.
“This is a large effect, both absolutely and in comparison with other influences on education,” adds the research team, led by University of Nevada sociologist M.D.R. Evans. “A child from a family rich in books is 19 percentage points more likely to complete university than a comparable child growing up without a home library.”
This effect holds true regardless of a nation’s wealth, culture or political system, but its intensity varies from country to country. In China, a child whose parents own 500 books will average 6.6 more years of education than a comparable child from a bookless home. In the U.S., the figure is 2.4 years — which is still highly significant when you consider it’s the difference between two years of college and a full four-year degree.
By the way, if you talk to my wife, please don’t mention that whole “correlation doesn’t equal causation” thing to her.
(Via: Neatorama)
April 13th, 2010 | 5:45 pm
Yes!!!
I have discovered this through years of teaching.
April 13th, 2010 | 6:41 pm
[...] (Hat-tip: First Things) [...]
April 13th, 2010 | 6:59 pm
The Freakonomics guys say the same thing in their first book, though the correlation, they say, has nothing to do with the actual number of books you own. If you believe them, what matters is not what you do as a parent but who you already are. Parents who are inherently self-motivated and intelligent will likely be bibliophiles and, therefore, collect lots of books. So what’s important is not that you collect lots of books but that you be a parent who would be likely to do so in the first place. Inherently self-motivated and intelligent parents produce self-motivated and intelligent kids, not a library in the bathroom.
April 13th, 2010 | 7:39 pm
“please don’t mention that whole ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation’ thing”
Yeah, it does occur to ask, what if your kid turns out not to like reading?! ;-)
April 13th, 2010 | 10:48 pm
The “correlation doesn’t equal causation” thing probably wouldn’t apply here. That holds true in tenuous relationships, but when there is such a high degree of relationship, as there clearly is here, a direct relationship is statistically implied. Though I agree with Ryan’s point (I also read Freakonomics), numbers this high–perhaps someone better versed in statistics than I could opine if standard deviations come into play here–seem like a pretty reliable predictor.
In conclusion, vindication of my own sprawling stacks of books is awfully sweet…
April 14th, 2010 | 8:27 am
Sorry, I’m another Freakonomics reader and I also get the vague sense from (the summation of the article on) the study that it is plumping for pouring books (any books!) through every chimney in town until all the kids complete high school. Books don’t “propel” anything unless you’re the kind of person to read AND enjoy AND use them. Otherwise they’re just decorating your house.
And what kind of books are we talking here? Comic books? Cook books? Dictionaries? Antique first editions no one is allowed to touch let alone read?
April 14th, 2010 | 9:00 am
I love to read – nay I live to read. I have books in every room of the house. Neither of my children like to read. Sigh.
April 14th, 2010 | 10:11 am
While it’s true that correlation doesn’t equal causation and that the kind of books matter, the fact that there are 500+ books in a home communicate that they should be valued and pursued. That many books will require space – space that could be used for any number of things, but is instead used for books. Growing up we always had an entire room set aside for our books. Though never explicitly said, setting aside this kind of space for books implied that books are valuable and worth our attention.
Accessibility is also an incredible advantage. Of course, there are school and public libraries, but a home that contains books make it so much easier to happen upon reading. I can remember many times, when bored, wandering in to the library and often, finding a book with an interesting title or cover, ended up reading. I was rarely forced to read at home, but having books there meant that I often did.
Finally, even if all 500+ books are not of the greatest quality, there is something to be said for developing the habit of reading. The first books to which I gravitated were not the best books in our library. Over time, however, when the lesser quality books had been read, I kept reading and found myself developing a taste for better quality books. Looking back, I am embarrassed at some of the books I use to love, but, truth be told, it is because of them that I am a voracious reader (of good books now) today.
I think there are other things to be said here (like the fact that parents who acquire 500+ books will probably be internally motivated and will pass that characteristic on to their children), but even if that is not true, the presence of books will make it more likely for a child to discover the joys of reading and, therefore, learning.
April 14th, 2010 | 11:19 am
What does it feel like not to like to read? I can’t imagine how I’d feel if my kids didn’t share my love for reading.
April 14th, 2010 | 12:03 pm
Phew…I feel so much better. (My husband recently commented to one of our kids that there was nothing to eat in the house but there sure are enough books…which wasn’t true. There was food he didn’t like and a plethora of books)
In a culture that appears to approve of women who hoard mass quantities of expensive shoes, what’s so bad about a bit of a book compulsion?
One of my maternal joys is to have produced a librarian. Though of the other five of my children, the love of reading is quite variable. Which stings. It really stings.
April 14th, 2010 | 12:04 pm
Nor can I. Even my hyperkinetic 7-year-old, who has to run up and down to think, spends hours reading now that the switch has flipped and he’s fluent at it. Of course, in my house, there aren’t that many other options if you’re bored: you get 30 minutes on the computer or a video game, and after that you can wash dishes, walk the dog, or turn the compost pile.
I think it helps not only to have books on the shelves, but to have books you’d like a given child to read at a given time foregrounded on a rack or in a basket, or in some other deliberately-accidental manner put in the way of the child (in some homeschooling parlance, this is known as “strewing”). Younger children, especially, who can read but don’t have the patience to scan down a row of book spines, or the ability to discern from a book spine what’s going to be a good read, will pick things up more readily if they’re made accessible that way, so that the front cover is visible.
I think John Derbyshire once remarked that you’re really a reading household if you have books in the dishwasher. I don’t have a dishwasher, but I do have books in several kitchen cabinets.
April 14th, 2010 | 12:13 pm
My dad was a poor cotton farmer with a high school diploma; my mother finished only the 8th grade. We had food, clothes, and shoes, and a rather ramshackle roof over our heads, back in the 1950s. I doubt we had anything like 500 books in our home. (There wouldn’t have been room for them even if we could have bought them.) Our grammar school did not have a library, but we visited the county library every two weeks.
And my father spent what must have seemed like a fortune, to him, on a set of World Book Encyclopedias, with the deluxe white binding. That set of encyclopedia volumes made all the difference; my sister and I both graduated with four-year degrees, and I have an MA in history and teach in a community college.
Yes, I know all about the internet, but it can never replace those World Books.
April 14th, 2010 | 3:37 pm
I’ve been turning over in my mind the oddness of a decorating trend which involves the display of old books. I’ve been in people’s houses where, indeed, here are the beautiful old books on display — and they’re all in Danish or something, of which the members of the household cheerfully admit they don’t understand one word, but don’t the books look pretty on the coffee table?
April 14th, 2010 | 5:47 pm
I homeschool so that I have an excuse to keep building our home library. :) (No, that’s not the only reason I homeschool, of course.) We have upwards of 3000 books in our home, well over half of which are children’s books. We use a curriculum that utilizes “living books” rather than textbooks for the most part, so I have scads of books tagged for different grade levels. Sigh…I’m in my happy place surrounded by books. So far, my three reading-aged kids love reading; we’ll have to see about #4 who isn’t reading fluently yet. :)
April 14th, 2010 | 5:51 pm
[...] the results of this study aren’t exactly earth-shattering, but – like Joe Carter – I’m going to use this to justify keeping my book-case full to [...]
April 17th, 2010 | 12:24 am
I work and live in a very poor area of Honduras. Most people do not have access to books. Public libraries are unheard of, and schools rely on rote copying for learning. I started a small library in one community and it’s been my joy and delight to watch children and adults read. Just read. We take it for granted. I have less than 50 books. My dream is to take it mobile with a van and visit other neighborhoods for an hour of reading.
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