HEROES
PARENTS WHO READ TO THEIR CHILDREN

In this edition of the Eppley Files my HEROES are parents who read to their children, encourage them to read, give them books for Christmas and birthdays, discuss books with them and develop in them a lifelong love for books. Thankfully there are many millions who do this, but if we are to compete in our global economy, we need hundreds of millions more.

One of the greatest resources any community has is its library, and one of the greatest joys Anita and I have is to wait at the library check-out counter while a mom or dad, accompanied by two or three little children, hands books to the librarian to be stamped with the date the books are to be returned.

God bless those parents and others like them. Think what their day has been. They awakened those kids, dressed them, fed them, buckled them into the car, maybe shopped at the supermarket, drove to the library and helped them pick out books in the children’s section. Now they will drive them home, unpack the groceries and the library books, make lunch for them and maybe even read a book to them until they all fall asleep.

Fifteen years ago Anita and I used a Wall Street Journal article (11/22/93) in a college composition textbook we co-authored. The article was titled “Why I Read to My Children” by Christopher de Vinck. He writes:

All children come to school with a wide diversity of personal experience. I would say only 10% also come with a wide reading background. The child with the widest personal and reading background seems to carry the most intellectual baggage into my classroom year after year. This is the child who, eventually, scores the highest on the verbal section of the SATs, who is able to make sudden and clear connections between books and life, who has the strongest sense of what it means to live a life of reflection, who is the strongest writer. The SAT is a very biased test. It is biased against those who do not read.

Fifteen years later even more students enter college without a wide reading background and consequently cannot write clearly and logically in their classes across the curriculum. Just a few days ago New York Times journalist David Brooks quoted a college professor who teaches introduction to writing classes: “Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.”

In the 2008 election candidates in the primaries and in the general election all seemed to agree the infrastructure of the country is crumbling and in need of immediate repair. By infrastructure they meant bridges, highways, tunnels, airports, dams, levees, ports, sewers, water filtration systems, electrical power grids, airline connections, gas and oil transportation grids, water distribution networks, road and railway transportation systems. All are infrastructures that play fundamental roles in our everyday lives.

In my judgment, our most important infrastructure is the school whether primary, elementary, secondary, college, graduate, or post graduate.

Presently, we do not know how much President Obama’s economic stimulus package will be. Whatever its size let’s hope that a significant portion will be used to modernize our schools and revitalize our school systems by hiring the best and the brightest administrators and teachers. And let’s hope that schools have the foresight and imagination to recognize and honor parents who read to their children.

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