ReadingHow Important Is It?

By Dr. Heather W. Allen

Reading is an amazing adventure. I remember as a child picking up a book and being lost in
the pages for hours at a time. I also remember that the rule in our home growing up was
that we had to go to bed at 8 p.m., but we could stay up later, in bed, provided we were
reading. My brother and sisters and I would often read until our parents would come in,
sometimes hours later, to tell us it was time for lights out. It did not take us long to become
avid readers, engrossed in stories that took us to faraway places. We also found ourselves
fascinated by nonfiction works, especially journals of explorers, such as Meriwether Lewis
and William Clark, who left St. Louis in 1804 to find a water route to the Pacific, or John
Wesley Powell, who explored the Colorado River and Grand Canyon in 1869 and again in
1871. Then there were the classics. How could a child not love Anne of Green Gables or
Treasure Island or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer? I cannot imagine not reading something
every day.
Frederick Douglass said, Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.1 There is such
heartfelt truth to that statement. As I started researching this topic, I focused on the
literacy statistics. Literacy is the ability to read and write and should be our primary goal
when educating our children. Eudora Welty said, Indeed, learning to write may be a part of
learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading. 2
Is your child a reader? Is your child a writer? Have you seen that one follows the other as
stated by Welty? I know in my home I have. My older children were not overly keen on
reading when I first started the whole teaching-them-to-read process. Early on you would
have thought that reading was the worst thing imaginable for my oldest son. We had spent
years reading to him, along with his siblings, and he was quite content to maintain the
status quo. Why read when Mom and Dad will read to me? We still to this day read to all of
our children, but our son knew his time had come. He would learn to read and he would
love it like we do.
I had this goofy idea that I would bribe my first son to read. Yes, it is true. I bribed him. He
received a dollar for every book he read. He read and read and became quite proficient in a
very short time. He loved to see those dollars rolling in. One day he asked me how much I
would pay him to read the entire 26-volume Comptons Encyclopedia. I looked at that set
spanning a whole shelf in our family room and decided that it was worth more than a dollar
a volume, so I pulled a number out of the air and said, Fifty dollars. I will pay you $50 to
read the complete set. I told my husband later that evening about the deal, and he looked
at me and said, You know hell do it, dont you? Sure enough, he read every volume,
cover to cover, and I paid up. From that point on I never paid him to read a book again, and
he has never stopped reading. He thoroughly enjoys reading, as do his brothers and sisters,
and for him his love of reading has served him well. He is in college in another state and
doing well.
Does a superior devotion to reading foster a love for writing and an ability to write? Again,
my children initially thought writing was the next worst thing imaginable to do after reading.
All are avid readers and now, after many writing assignments, are avid writers; two of them
are currently working on their own novels. We have seen that the better they are at
reading, the better they are at writing, and the better they are at reading, the better they
are at spelling, and the better they are at reading, the better they are at problem solving.
The list goes on.

There is nothing more important in our homeschooling efforts than teaching a child to read
and teaching a child to love to read. Elizabeth Hardwick years ago said, The greatest gift is
a passion for reading. I think she is right on the mark. A passion for reading is a foundation
for much in life, especially with the competing electronics that are enveloping so many in
our society. Groucho Marx had something to say on the topic of electronics, specifically
televisions: I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns
it on, I go to the library and read a book. And there was C. S. Lewis who said, We read to
know we are not alone. Reading is so very important.
Examining the statistics and whats relevant when it comes to reading, I am not going to
focus on the homeschooling data but rather will take a look at all the data. Sometimes I
think we get caught up in homeschooling-specific data when whats really important is data
pertaining to children.
Research shows that children who grow up in homes where books are plentiful tend to go,
on average, three years further in school than those who do not. When children have access
to books at home, children with low-education families do as well on standardized tests as
children with high-education families.3 Children in classrooms without literature collections
read 50% less than children in classrooms with such collections.4 Children typically learn
4,000 to 12,000 new words yearly as a result of reading books.5 And the performance
advantage among children whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident
regardless of the familys socio-economic background.6
What do the statistics show for children who do not learn to read and read well? Children
who do not read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave school
without a diploma when compared to proficient readers. The number rises when those
children also come from poverty.7 Every school day in the United States, 3,000 children
drop out, and the majority of those children are poor readers. Children with below-gradelevel reading skills are twice as likely to drop out of school as those who can read on or
above grade level.8 Nearly one-third of all college freshmen had to take a remedial course in
reading in 20072008, and following that remedial course, each had only a 17% chance of
graduating.9
What a difference reading makes in the life of a child. And what a gift you will have given
your child when you teach the love of reading.
Heather and her husband, Steve, live in Edgewood, New Mexico, where they have
homeschooled their five children, Edward (19), Joseph (17), Emily (14), Hana (8), and
Ezekiel (8), for the last fourteen years. When not homeschooling, doing things with her
family, or writing for TOS, Heather works as a Human Factors Engineer in her home-based
consulting business. Please visit their website: www.hippityhooves.com.
Endnotes:
1

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave with
related documents. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003.
2
Welty, Eudora & Bausch, Richard (Introduction). (March 23, 2011). On Writing. Modern
Library. ISBN: 0679642706.
3
Evans, M. D. R., Kelley, Jonathan, Sikora, J., and Treiman, D. J. (June, 2010). Family
scholarly Culture and Educational Success: Books and Schooling in 27 Nations. Research in
Social Stratification and Mobility. Vol. 28, Issue 2, pgs.171197.

Morrow, L. M. (1998). Motivating lifelong voluntary readers. Unpublished manuscript, New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University.
5
Anderson, R. C. & Nagy, W. E. (1992). The Vocabulary Conundrum. American Educator,
1418, 4446.
6
PISA IN FOCUS 2011/10 (November) OECD 2011. Found at
www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/4/1/49012097.pdf (June 10, 2012).
7
Hernandez, D. J. (2012). Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty
Influence High School Graduation. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, Baltimore, Maryland.
8
Alliance for Excellent Education (2003, November). Adolescents and Literacy: Reading for
the 2st Century. Washington, DC: Kamil, M.
9
Jenkins, D., & Boswell, K. (2002). State policies on community college remedial
education: Findings
from a national survey. Denver, CO: Education Commission of the States.
Copyright 2012, used with permission. All rights reserved by author. Originally appeared in
the October 2012 issue of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, the family education magazine.
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