Growing up amid books = literacy

[John F]

What a surprise! But then, people research the obvious in case it turns out not to be so. I guess. Somehow the books I grew up with and have now seem not to have improved my "numeracy."

Home Libraries Confer Long-Term Benefits
A large new study finds people who grew up in book-filled homes have higher reading, math, and technological skills.

Tom Jacobs
Oct 8, 2018

We've known for a while that home libraries are strongly linked to children's academic achievement. What's less certain is whether the benefits they bestow have a long-term impact. A new large-scale study, featuring data from 31 countries, reports they do indeed. It finds the advantages of growing up in a book-filled home can be measured well into adulthood.

"Adolescent exposure to books is an integral part of social practices that foster long-term cognitive competencies," writes a research team led by Joanna Sikora of Australian National University. These reading-driven abilities not only "facilitate educational and occupational attainment," the researchers write in the journal Social Science Research. "[They] also lay a foundation for lifelong routine activities that enhance literacy and numeracy."

The researchers analyzed data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Competencies. Its surveys, taken between 2011 and 2015, featured adults (ages 25 to 65) in 31 nations, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Singapore, and Turkey.

All participants were asked how many books there were in their home when they were 16 years old. (One meter of shelving, they were told, holds about 40 books.) They chose from a series of options ranging from "10 or less" to "more than 500."

Literacy was defined as "the ability to read effectively to participate in society and achieve personal goals." Participants took tests that "captured a range of basic through advanced comprehension skills, from reading brief texts for a single piece of information to synthesizing information from complex texts."

Numeracy tests measured the "ability to use mathematical concepts in everyday life," while IT-related tests "assessed the ability to use digital technology to communicate with others, as well as to gather, analyze, and synthesize information."

The results suggest those volumes made a long-term difference. "Growing up with home libraries boosts adult skills in these areas beyond the benefits accrued from parental education, or [one's] own educational or occupational attainment," the researchers report.

Not surprisingly, the biggest impact was on reading ability. "The total effects of home library size on literacy are large everywhere," the researchers report. Growing up with few books in the house was associated with below-average literacy rates, while he presence of around 80 books raised those rates to the mean. Literacy continued to increase with the number of reported books up to around 350, at which point it flattened out. Similarly, the effects of a home library on numeracy were quite significant across the board. Its impact on technological skills was smaller but also widespread.

These results raise two interesting questions. First: Will findings like this fade as printed books become less-important sources of knowledge in the digital age? Perhaps, Sikora and her colleagues write, but for now, "the beneficial effects of home libraries in adolescence are large and hold in many different societies, with no sign of diminution over time. Moreover, home library size is positively related to higher levels of digital literacy."

The second, broader question is: Precisely how does growing up around books produce more highly skilled adults? More research will be needed to find out, but Sikora and her colleagues note that "children emulate parents who read," and, in such an environment, acquiring knowledge via the written word often becomes a pleasurable pastime. "Scholarly culture is a way of life," they conclude.

Clearly, that pattern of behavior gets established early. Spend time as a teen pulling books off a shelf, and the resultant benefits will have a very long shelf life.

https://psmag.com/education/home-librar ... m-benefits

[jbuck919]

Interesting research, and I am not one to use single examples to contradict statistics. However, though I flatter myself that I am extremely literate and have demonstrated that here, my parents, though literate, had no concept of a home library. There was the odd book or two hanging around, but not much more. I bootstrapped myself to where I am, and the best I can do is thank my parents in memory for supporting it.

[John F]

"Adolescent exposure to books is an integral part of social practices that foster long-term cognitive competencies," says the story. In a home with books, that emcounter can be daily and casual; one doesn't have to go to a library, or return what one is reading when finished or when time runs out. But obviously one can become literate, or more literate, by using a public library or school library if there is one. I doubt there were many books in the home where Shakespeare grew up.

I can trace some of my own tastes in reading to my parents and the books they got and kept around the house - detective stories, for example, and Ogden Nash. And also the children's books they got for my brother and me. I know nothing of what my father's family had for reading matter, but after my mother's mother died and we were clearing out her house, I came across "The Wizard of Oz" and a half dozen sequels which can only have been for my mother. (I gave them to my niece when her first daughter was born.)

[jserraglio]

Home library? In my dreams. I would've settled for one book.

[Belle]

Home library? In my dreams. I would've settled for one book.

We didn't have a 'home library' either when I was growing up, but the sister after me (there are 4 of us) always seemed to have a book - presumably it came from school - and she is still very gifted at writing poetry. My father read engineering books and journals and he was also a fan of socio-cultural books. This was one of his favourites and he quoted its author very often:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Socia ... 1970_book)

Little in the way of fiction for my father, but my mother read loads of fiction which presumably came courtesy of the local library. Only in my early married life did I notice my parents had built a special bookcase in their new home on one entire wall to cover fiction and non-fiction - and that there were a lot of books. Go figure. Plenty of classical 33rpm recordings right from the beginning, though. On my father's deathbed in 2004 I read him "The Reagan Letters" which had been published in 'Time' magazine. In his enfeebled state he said to me, "people said Reagan wasn't bright; clearly that was wrong".

Our early experiences of reading, music, radio and television are so evocative; Gardner McKay in "Aaaddddventures in Paradise"!! How well and fondly I remember the "Mickey Mouse Club" and, on 78rpm, Bing Crosby "Would You Like to Swing on a Star"? That thick, brass needle jumped up and down on those well-worn records to engrave memories on my brain of so happy and innocent a time that I become emotional reminiscing. How long ago it all seems. I feel sorry for children today, shoved into daycare ('early learning' is the new euphemism) without loads of unstructured play and down time. Nobody had anything when I was growing up but complaints were few and far between. (Now I'm sounding like "The Four Yorkshiremen"!)

[John F]

My father had a library in his study - he was a college professor of English - and another in his office at the college. I looked around when a kid, of course, but never found anything I wanted to read. Otherwise we had no particular space that we thought of as a "library," just a couple of bookcases here and there with a haphazard assortment of books bought mainly for recreational reading. (My brother and I had no bookcase in our bedroom.)

Every year at Christmas I give my great-nieces a book each, in addition to something else. Their parents have read to them until they were old and literate enough to read for themselves. We are definitely middle class and well educated, and reading comes naturally to us. But I can well imagine that many, many American homes are as book-barren as jserraglio says his was. Yet here he is, reading and writing with no apparent effort, if anything somewhat better than I do. (You wouldn't believe the amount of revision I do before posting and sometimes after.) Well, that's what school is for, or supposed to be.

[Belle]

It's so interesting learning about the stories of other people!! And you've really tapped into something essential; despite a dearth of books in early years people can mature into excellent writers, speakers and thinkers. I think we'd have to draw the conclusion that reading is a very big advantage to young children going through the school system, helping them to become confident with language, developing concentration skills and becoming more articulate. But it isn't the end of the story and I find that fascinating. I didn't read much as a teenager but I was very articulate and endowed with a photographic memory. I was also able to write imaginately and my best subject was English. Somehow this seemed unfair given that many peers read assiduously to develop their skills and I did not. This was always enigmatic to me.

My photographic memory enables great chunks of poetry, drama and prose to be summoned at will. Mother was that way with the piano and I'm sure this aided her success in that instrument. My students at school were always amazed by how I could snatch a relevant quote out of the air from some book or other source and use it to great effect in the classroom. Nobody was more surprised than I about having such a skill!!

I totally get what you're saying about editing one's own writing; yes. Perhaps this is part of a perfectionist mindset. And I agree with you about jserraglio - clearly a gifted writer!!

[John F]

At one point I was paid for editing other people's writing, as a college textbook editor at W.W. Norton and St. Martin's Press. That and my previous major in English made me alert and picky about usage and style. I share that with jbuck919 - we used to "correct" each other here, but mercifully no longer.

[jbuck919]

I said one or two books, but one of them was a rather elegant edition of the Bible, which came with a glossary. I suppose no one else here knows that excardination means allowing a priest to exercise his faculties in another diocese.

Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred
in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he
hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not
replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in
the duller parts:
And such barren plants are set before us, that we
thankful should be,
Which we of taste and feeling are, for those parts that
do fructify in us more than he.
For as it would ill become me to be vain, indiscreet, or a fool,
So were there a patch set on learning, to see him in a school:
But omne bene, say I; being of an old father's mind, 31
Many can brook the weather that love not the wind.

--Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost

[Belle]

An absolutely magnificent quote! I hadn't read it before. I wonder what he would have written today about the internet and kindles?

[jserraglio]

Yet here he is, reading and writing with no apparent effort, if anything somewhat better than I do. (You wouldn't believe the amount of revision I do before posting and sometimes after.).

I wish that were the case. In fact, I was illiterate until well on into second grade (promoted to that exalted rank solely b/c my first-grade teacher bucked a principal who wanted the rules followed and me held back). To this day I read laboriously and, borderline dyslexic, have to revise even short CMG messages on the fly or often repeatedly after I post them.

I reckon the experience of having my young life set on a positive trajectory by one important teacher who put her hunch about a kid ahead of protocol is why I esteem early-childhood educators above even university professors. If I had my way, those underwriters of primary language acquisition and early socialization would be the most cherished, highly trained and highly paid of all civil servants. Society would recoup many times over whatever was spent on them.

[jserraglio]

An absolutely magnificent quote! I hadn't read it before. I wonder what he [Shakespeare] would have written today about the internet and kindles?

He might derisively have called them "newfangled" — and that would have been sorta newfangled of him — this word was relatively new when he used it in Sonnet 91, again in Love's Labour's Lost and later in As You Like It:

Biron
Why should I joy in any abortive birth?
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled mirth; 110
But like of each thing that in season grows.
So you, to study now it is too late,
Climb o'er the house to unlock the little gate.
LLL I, i.

Rosalind:
Say 'a day' without the 'ever.'
No, no, Orlando; Men are April when they woo,
December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids,
but the sky changes when they are wives.
I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary rooster-pigeon
over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain,
more new-fangled than an ape, 1119
more giddy in my desires than a monkey. I will weep for
nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you
are dispos'd to be merry; I will laugh like a hyena, and that when
thou are inclin'd to sleep. AYLI IV, i.

[Belle]

Gold. Absolutely love it!!

[jserraglio]

Given to me for winning a Latin essay contest, this book was one of the two most important I ever read as a kid. My childish faith was severely shaken by the author's acceptance of the higher criticism in the Gospels, and I descended into a state of high anxiety after reading it.



The other book was an early paperback edition of The Catcher in the Rye. I still have the cover from the copy . . .



. . . I smuggled into school and read on the sly. It was banned at our school, and I dreaded expulsion if I were ever caught reading it.



A fellow student actually had been expelled after being found with a Mickey Spillane novel! Salinger's words seemed to leap off the page at me. The only other book this ever happened to me with, and much later in life, was August Wilson's Fences.


_______________________________________________________

Currently on my Kindle, courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library:

[John F]

After reading "Kitchen Confidential" you may never want to eat in a restaurant again.

[jserraglio]

After reading "Kitchen Confidential" you may never want to eat in a restaurant again.

Never on Monday, anyway.

This book shores up words I've not ever heard nor seen.

And to think I used to pry mussels open and devour'em raw on the shores of all places to breathe my last, Buzzards Bay, and still don't rinse my leafy greens.

[jbuck919]

After reading "Kitchen Confidential" you may never want to eat in a restaurant again.

Never on Monday, anyway.

This book shores up words I've not ever heard nor seen.

And to think I used to pry mussels open and devour'em raw on the shores of all places to breathe my last, Buzzards Bay, and still don't rinse my leafy greens.

Perhaps you can explain to me why mussels were when I was younger plump and cheap but are now scrawny and expensive. Or why catfish, the sorriest fish you would ever think of eating though in fact it is delicious, and which like mussels is farmed, now costs about the same as salmon.

[RebLem]

And also why perch, which used to be a common fish, is no longer available anywhere. Are they extinct? Completely fished out?

[John F]

Pike perch is common in the menus of Berlin restaurants. Now there's a useless piece of trivia...

[jserraglio]

And also why perch, which used to be a common fish, is no longer available anywhere. Are they extinct? Completely fished out?

Try fishing in Lake Erie: commercial as well as sport fishing for walleye and yellow perch, among others.


Aug 10, 2018: Capt. Larry Petterson of Spoonfeeder Charters in Marblehead has been having a lot of success catching Lake Erie
yellow perch, showing off a double-header he hooked while fishing the Bass Islands area.

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission's Lake Erie Committee announced today the 2018 TAC (Total Allowable Catch) for Lake Erie.

The Walleye TAC is 7.109 million fish, a 20% increase from 2017's TAC of 5.924 million fish. Based upon water surface area in lake management units, Ohio's share will rise to 3.634 million Walleye, Ontario's to 3.061 million, and Michigan's to 414,000.

The 2018 Yellow Perch TAC is 10.498 million pounds, a very slight increase from the 2017 TAC of 10.375 million pounds. These will be divided across the four management units at levels very similar to 2017.

[jserraglio]

David McCullough's forthcoming book on the Northwest Ordinance and the settlement of the Northwest Territory:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4681311/ ... -ordinance

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4667124/ ... t-pioneers

[jbuck919]

David McCullough's forthcoming book on the Northwest Ordinance and the settlement of the Northwest Territory:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4681311/ ... -ordinance

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4667124/ ... t-pioneers

For those who do not know, this means the northwest part of the US at the time of independence, and before the Louisiana Purchase. I suppose that I will have to check this out (in both senses of the term), but I don't much like David McCullough. He is too laudatory.

[jserraglio]

I don't much like David McCullough. He is too laudatory.

Agreed, insofar as the subject of the settlement of the Old Northwest Territory is concerned. The vast physical and moral beauties of the place beggar any description a historian might give, even one like McCullough who hails from adjacent, and stunning, western Pennsylvania:

(1) The Northwest Territory was the land of the free. Slaves became free simply by crossing the Ohio River into the NW Territory, which made up what later became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and eastern Minnesota.


The Virginia cession of 1783-84 to the USA later became the NW Territory.

(2) It provided secular public education (e.g., the University of Michigan, founded 1817, became one of the seedbeds of higher learning in the world).


The University of Michigan, circa 1855.

(3) Finally, unlike theocratic regions like New England, one's practice of religion or even one's refusal to do so was unconstrained by state authority.


Schoenbrunn Village, New Philadelphia, Ohio (1772-77) predated the Northwest Ordinance by 15 years. It is an extraordinary place.

[jbuck919]

Mebee so, mebee so, but in terms of slavery, the Dred Scott decision negated all of that, and the horrendously racist Woodrow Wilson had a father who moved the family from Ohio to Virginia so that he could own slaves. (Otherwise, to make my trivia point for the day, we would have nine presidents from Ohio instead of the already record eight.)

[lennygoran]

the horrendously racist Woodrow Wilson had a father who moved the family from Ohio to Virginia so that he could own slaves. (Otherwise, to make my trivia point for the day, we would have nine presidents from Ohio instead of the already record eight.)

And now Virginia may be more blue than Ohio! Regards, Len

[John F]

Staunton, VA has two distinctions: it's the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson and my mother's father Edgar Funkhouser. Both did rather well for themselves.

[jserraglio]

in terms of slavery, the Dred Scott decision negated all of that

Whereas roughly seventy years (30% of the life of our Republic to date) elapsed between the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Dred Scott case in 1857, the Dred Scott Decision itself held sway for less than a decade, a good part of which that SCOTUS ruling was effectively 'negated' on the battlefield.

So the 1787 Ordinance banning slavery in the Northwest Territory west and north of the Ohio River was a direct precursor to the Underground Railroad movement where the Ohio became the metaphorical "River Jordan" for runaway slaves.

By comparison, on the Coast, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts did not pass legislation abolishing slavery until it ratified the 13th Amendment in 1865, even though in practice slavery had died out there long ago, during the Federal Period, after which time Massachusetts became a center of abolitionism.