Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage

Will your child finish college? The answer may be as close as your bookshelves, or lack thereof.
By Tom Jacobs

In an era of electronic entertainment, the term “home library” increasingly has the word “video” in the middle. But before parents start giving away books to clear shelf space for DVDs, they’ll want to consider the results of a comprehensive new study.

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.

More: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/home-libraries-provide-huge-educational-advantage-14212/

Sadly in our anti-intellectual society, home libraries are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

:aarcasm:



Tansy Gold, surrounded by books

I've been to a few. :-(

:wow:

and both of our daughters completed graduate school.

However, while our children admired their parents propensity for reading, they did not actually read many of the books in our home library.

I guess it is the presence of books that has the effect--not the children's reading habits.

Best thing you could do.

moved into a house on several acres near Occidenal, Ca. The house had a library with works by everyone from Goya to Tolstoy. As a pre-pubecent kid who loved to read, this was a great source of pleasure, as was learning to can foods and cook. My sepmother's mother walked barefoot over the Sierrias to settle Oregon and my stepmother learned to put food by from her mother. She passed that appreciation of food and cooking on to me.

To this day, I #1 love to read and #2 love to cook, and #3, I love to grow the stuff I cook which is always so much better that the crap you get at Safeway.

As to books, I love books. I've run out of room to store all of my books so I have twice taken a pickup truck full to donate to the San Jose library and still have books stacked everywhere in the house. Floors, bookshelves, bathrooms, etc. Was this because I was exposed to really good books at an early age? Probably.

I have chosen to eschew children. My wife has them along with grandchildren and so many great grandchildren that I sometimes think I spend all of my disposable income on birthday presents for kids whose names I don't even know.

I hate kids! They disrespect my lawn!

B.

When I was a kid the neighborhood kids would come over and do their papers at my house, because we had The Book of Knowledge, Brittanica Junior, the Time-Life Nature Library, Science Library, World Library, Time-Life Atlas, some of those science encyclopedias you could buy one at a time in the supermarket, and all sorts of books.

I've still got my mother's 1927 Compton's Encyclopedia, and I told her she was really really OLD because the map of the solar system does not have Pluto on it.
:rofl:

The school used The World Book. I remember a teacher saying, "If you copy your paper out of WorldBook I will give you an F, because I can recognize the style".

So when I moved to East Texas, I took 23 bookcases of books, vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, sheet music up here. Some of it was DH's and some of it was mine. We have most subjects and genres of music covered well, between the two of us. He also has the Great Books which are real handy when you want to read original source material, like Newton or Marx.

I've read articles on interior decorating with things like "hints on what to fill your bookshelves up with" for people who don't read!!! :banghead:

And then I've seen houses where they have books...but nothing but bodice-rippers. Yuck!

to use ONLY for decorative purposes-or even worse, to rip off their gilded spines and create fake "library" walls out of them!

that is the direction books will move. These days I know I use GOOGLE BOOKS quite a bit, and brutally honest a few of them are rare.

But readying is readying is readying and it is critical.

Oh and by the way water boils at 100 centigrade.

It was a weekly thing - one evening each week we would all go to the library. Our town had a Carnegie Library that had been well maintained and that had a great collection of books.

At home, we had all the classics on the lists for school and college students to read. In addition, each of us had our own shelves of books for our interests.

My earliest memories of my father are of him reading "The Jungle Book" and other classics to me as I fell asleep. My biggest problem with books has always been keeping enough of them around.

My mom let us buy any book we wanted. I couldn't live any other way.