Why we care
Why we should care about the current crisis in children’s reading
‘A children’s book is not a luxury good. It is absolutely fundamental to our culture, to the grown-ups we become, to the society we build. A children’s book at its very best has liberatory power.’
Katherine Rundell, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, BBC Radio 4.
Benefits to the individual of reading
If we want our children to reach their potential then it is important that they both acquire reading fluency early and that they go on to become voracious readers. Children learn to read and then read to learn, and in so doing acquire knowledge of the world and an ability to operate within it.
“We, as adults, must remember how our childhood books made us feel. We must remember the books that made us feel that a child just like us could save the world. We must remember the books with characters that mirrored our own anxieties and made us feel seen, even while we hid our fears from others.”,
Patrice Lawrence, Writer in Residence, BookTrust, 2024
Benefits to society of reading
We must also remember that reading is not, though, just good for the individual but benefits society as a whole. Reading imparts knowledge, but reading for pleasure stimulates the imagination, and it is imagination combined with knowledge that promotes step change development. For society to leap forward we must nurture our children so that they can go beyond current knowledge, so that they can become the game changers of the future.
‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution’.
Einstein, 1931, Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms.