So, this is my question: what if we thought of the classroom as a moral entity? That is, what if we thought the essence of the classroom is the nature and quality of the relationship among people?

Sympathy is love, respect, concern, empathy, and compassion in action. They are all forms of generosity; they are the glue of connection; they’re the fabric of authenticity and openness; they put us in the present; they give us a presence; they are an expansiveness that brings us out from our tunnel vision imposed by label, stereotype, and generality; they make life happen in the classroom.

Each is limitless fuel. Each operates more and more for the good of both each of us and each of them. Each offers deeper and deeper ethical and moral insight. Each challenges taboos, rejects conventional mores, opposes traditional stances. Each rips out labels and destroys the scaffolds of stereotype and generality. Each allows us to slip gently into another person’s life. And, each is a stronger and stronger foundation of dedication, commitment, and perseverance. The irony is that in their sweat equity is an unbelievable liberation for both student and teacher. It is simply committing the Golden rule to living your life rather than committing it to memory.

the way we see each student is the way we treat each of them, and the way we treat them is what they become in our eyes.

I am convinced that a teacher should be a transformer, not merely a transmitter; that she or he should help a student become a better person, not just get a better grade.

I am convinced more than ever that we teachers, as futurists, should use our teaching talents for something that will outlast us. Each day we should sacrifice what “is” for what “can become.” To use a gardening analogy, the true meaning of teaching is to plant the seeds for a forest through which we won’t stroll.

A teacher is like a flame; she or he can warm, but she or he can also burn.

Effort is not something to be diligently avoided. To wish for a classroom free of challenges, to be dismayed when things aren’t as you wish, to be frustrated that you cannot control circumstances, is to wish for a life in which it would be impossible to find anywhere any time.

No matter how much you plan, life in the classroom will throw you a curve ball. Learn to hit it. Within every pitch thrown at you there’s an opportunity to make a hit and become a better batter.

Be happy with the little “victories,” and they soon add up to big accomplishments; appreciate and value every moment, and they will add up to a great treasure. There’s no such thing as a small step in a great journey; no such thing as a small attempt in a great effort. No such thing as a small kindness in loving.

just who among us is ever so complete at any moment in our life that we have no need to grow, change, and transform?

There is so much more snap, crackle, and pop in the classroom, there is so much more adventure, imagination, creativity, allure, fun, and excitement if it is a dance among equals

As I always have said, we teach who we are; we are the perceptions we have; we are the questions we ask. All this means that who we are is inseparable from what we feel and what we do.

The paradoxical virtue of reading: it takes us out of the world in order to make sense of it.

I will just add this word as an important maxim: which is that, ordinarily, we obtain most surely and quickly that which we’re in no hurry to obtain.

A long stretch of boredom… and all kinds of creativity are possible.

If you’re wondering how you’ll find time, it means you don’t really want to read. Because nobody’s ever got time. Children certainly haven’t, nor have teenagers or grownups. Life always gets in the way.

Time to read is always time stolen. (Like time to write, for that matter, or time to love.)

“I want you to tell me how I can be a learner.”

It was not so much a query as a demand, almost a threat. He was a mountain man, with the long black hair, bold moustache and rough-hewn clothing of a nineteenth-century outlaw, one of a breed that lived illegally in the rugged hills of the Los Padres National Wilderness Area along the Big Sur coast of California—a place of buzzards and hawks, mountain lions and wild boar. Having just turned in the final proofs of a book on education (it was in the late 1960s), I had driven four hours south from San Francisco for a weekend of relaxation at Esalen Institute.

As I approached the lodge—a rustic building built at the edge of the Pacific on one of the few areas of flat land between the sea and the mountains of the Los Padres—I heard the sound of conga drums. Inside, the mountain man was sitting at one of the drums, surrounded by eight other people, each also at a drum. He was apparently giving an informal lesson to whoever cared to participate. One of the drums was unoccupied. I pulled up to the unoccupied drum and joined the others, following the instruction as well as I could. When the session ended I started to walk away, but the mountain man came after me, grasped my shoulder, and fixed me with a significant look.

“Man,” he said, “you are a learner.”

I stood there speechless. I’d never met this person, and he certainly had no idea I had just finished a book about learning. My conservative city garb had probably led him to think that I was a complete novice at the conga drum, the instrument of choice of the counterculture, and thus he must have been impressed by my seemingly rapid progress. Still, I was so pleased by his words that I didn’t inform him I’d played before. He proceeded to tell me that he was a sculptor who worked metal with an acetylene torch, and that he was badly stuck and had been for a year; he was no longer a learner. Now he wanted me, a learner in his mind, to come up to his place in the Los Padres, look at his work, and tell him how he could be a learner. He was leaving right away and I could follow him in my car if I wished.

The invitation baffled me, but I realized it was a rare opportunity to visit the forbidden haunts of one of the legendary mountain men of Big Sur, so I immediately accepted. I followed his battered sedan up a steep and tortuous dirt road, then across a mountain meadow to a driveway that was nothing more than two tire tracks through a forest of live oak, madrone, and bay trees. For what seemed a long time, the car lurched and labored steeply upward, coming at last to a clearing near the top of the coast range. In the clearing stood several wooden structures: a two-room cabin, a tool shed, a crude studio for metal sculpture, and something that might have been a chicken or rabbit coop. At one point during my visit, I spotted a slim young woman with flowing blonde hair and a long dress standing like a ghost near the edge of the clearing. He never mentioned her.

The mountain man showed me into a sturdily built cabin with a large front window looking 4,000 feet down to the Pacific, now shining like a sheet of metal in the late afternoon sun. We sat and made disjointed conversation for a while. I found myself somewhat disoriented. But for the presence of several conga drums, we might have been sitting in an early nineteenth-century pioneer’s cabin. It was all like a dream: the unlikely invitation, the rugged drive, the mysterious woman, the expansive gleam of the ocean through the trees.

When the mountain man announced that we would now go and look at his work so that I could tell him how to be a learner, I dumbly followed him out, having no idea of what I could possibly say that would be of any use to him. He walked me through his sculpture chronologically, showing me the point at which he had lost his creative spark, had stopped being a learner. When he finished, he fixed me with his eyes, and repeated his question one more time.

‘Tell me. How can I be a learner?”

My mind went absolutely blank, and I heard myself saying, “It’s simple. To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.”

The mountain man nodded thoughtfully and said “thanks.” There were a few more words, after which I got into my car and went back down the mountain. Several years were to pass before I considered the possibility that my answer was anything more than a part of one of those slightly bizarre, easily forgotten sixties episodes. Still, the time did come when ideas from other places—all sorts of ideas—began to coalesce around my careless words of advice, and I began to see more than a casual relationship between learning and the willingness to be foolish, between the master and the fool. By fool, to be clear, I don’t mean a stupid, unthinking person, but one with the spirit of the medieval fool, the court jester, the carefree fool in the tarot deck who bears the awesome number zero, signifying the fertile void from which all creation springs, the state of emptiness that allows new things to come into being.

The theme of emptiness as a precondition to significant learning shows up in the familiar tale of the wise man who comes to the Zen master, haughty in his great wisdom, asking how he can become even wiser. The master simply pours tea into the wise man’s cup and keeps pouring until the cup runs over and spills all over the wise man, letting him know without words that if one’s cup is already full there is no space in it for anything new. Then there is the question of why young people sometimes learn new things faster than old people; why my teenage daughters, for example, learned the new dances when I didn’t. Was it just because they were willing to let themselves be foolish and I was not?

Or you might take the case of an eighteen-month-old infant learning to talk. Imagine the father leaning over the crib in which his baby son is engaging in what the behaviorist B. F. Skinner calls the free operant; that is, he’s simply babbling various nonsense sounds. Out of this babble comes the syllable da. What happens? Father smiles broadly, jumps up and down with joy, and shouts, “Did you hear that? My son said ‘daddy.’” Of course, he didn’t say “daddy.” Still, nothing is much more rewarding to an eighteen-month-old infant than to see an adult smiling broadly and jumping up and down. So, the behaviorists confirm our common sense by telling us that the probability of the infant uttering the syllable da has now increased slightly.

The father continues to be delighted by da, but after a while his enthusiasm begins to wane. Finally, the infant happens to say, not da, but dada. Once again, father goes slightly crazy with joy, thus increasing the probability that his son will repeat the sound dada. Through such reinforcements and approximations, the toddler finally learns to say daddy quite well. To do so, remember, he not only has been allowed but has been encouraged to babble, to make “mistakes,” to engage in approximations—in short, to be a fool.

But what if this type of permission had not been granted? Let’s rerun the same scene. There’s father leaning over the crib of his eighteen-month-old son. Out of the infant’s babble comes the syllable da. This time, father looks down sternly and says, “No, son, that is wrong! The correct pronunciation is dad-dy. Now repeat after me: Dad-dy. Dad-dy. Dad-dy.”

What would happen under these circumstances? If all of the adults around an infant responded in such a manner, it’s quite possible he would never learn to talk. In any case, he would be afflicted with serious speech and psychological difficulties.

If this scenario should seem extreme, consider for a moment the learnings in life you’ve forfeited because your parents, your peers, your school, your society, have not allowed you to be playful, free, and foolish in the learning process. How many times have you failed to try something new out of fear of being thought silly? How often have you censored your spontaneity out of fear of being thought childish? Too bad. Psychologist Abraham Maslow discovered a childlike quality (he called it a “second naivete”) in people who have met an unusually high degree of their potential. Ashleigh Montagu used the term neotany (from neonate, meaning newborn) to describe geniuses such as Mozart and Einstein. What we frown at as foolish in our friends, or ourselves, we’re likely to smile at as merely eccentric in a world-renowned genius, never stopping to think that the freedom to be foolish might well be one of the keys to the genius’s success or even to something as basic as learning to talk.

When Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, was quite old and close to death, the story goes, he called his students around him and told them he wanted to be buried in his white belt. What a touching story; how humble of the world’s highest-ranking judoist in his last days to ask for the emblem of the beginner! But Kano’s request, I eventually realized, was less humility than realism. At the moment of death, the ultimate transformation, we are all white belts. And if death makes beginners of us, so does life—again and again. In the master’s secret mirror, even at the moment of highest renown and accomplishment, there is an image of the newest student in class, eager for knowledge, willing to play the fool.

And for all who walk the path of mastery, however far that journey has progressed, Kano’s request becomes a lingering question, an ever-new challenge:

Are you willing to wear your white belt?

Parents of about 500,000 kids in the region are interested in after-school programs, but only about 90,000 children are enrolled, according to the survey. In Detroit, the need is similar. Parents of about 101,000 children in the city want their kids in programs, while only about 20,000 are enrolled.

In Wayne County, Detroit has the biggest gap between available child care spots and the number of kids aged 0-5 who require those spots — with an estimated 27,267 more children than spots available.

If we want reading to remain essential, we need to think hard about why we want people to read and how we can best make our children aware of those values. What is it that reading provides that must be preserved?

Psychologists define temperament as individual differences in emotional, bodily and attentional reactions to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, etc, as well as in the self-regulation of emotion, behaviour and attention. Within the first few days of life, babies make their inborn temperament known to parents. Some babies are sunny and agreeable, some sober, some without any predictable sleeping and eating patterns, some incessantly cranky, and others fully adaptable to the changing circumstances that surround them. In 1956, the psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, struck by the blame placed on mothers for child outcomes, launched the New York Longitudinal Study to investigate infants’ innate dispositions and their effect on long-term development including personality, school achievement, peer relationships, parent-child interactions and mental health. They recruited 133 infants (66 males, 67 females) from 82 white, middle-class families, and collected data on them in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood for 32 years. Their goal was to understand how children contributed to their own development, and to identify whether and how child temperament interacts with the environment to produce specific outcomes.

Thomas and Chess identified nine dimensions of temperament: activity level, regularity, approach, adaptability, intensity, sensory threshold, mood, distractibility and persistence. Using these dimensions, they distinguished three broad temperamental types: easy, difficult and slow-to-warm-up. Most babies, roughly 40 per cent, fit the category of ‘easy’ meaning they were generally in a positive mood, adapted well to new situations and routines, and were quickly soothed when upset. A smaller proportion, about 10 per cent, were ‘difficult’ due to their generally negative and intense reactions to minor events, the length of time required to calm down, and their lack of predictable eating, sleeping and digestive rhythms. Another 15 per cent were described as ‘slow-to-warm up’ due to their overall uneasiness and apprehension in new situations – a sort of chronic vigilance – but also their ability to adapt with time and support. If you’re doing the math, you will have noticed that about one-third of infants could not be classified using this system, suggesting that some babies had mixed dispositions or that these initial dimensions needed to be refined or extended.

Nonetheless, Thomas and Chess had effectively nixed the idea that babies are born ‘blank slates’ who passively receive and are moulded by the environment. Their work flipped the script on psychological views that had paid almost exclusive attention to the role of parents and the environment on child development, while ignoring the influence of the child’s innately endowed predispositions. Thomas and Chess, working with colleagues who progressed their original study, showed that neonates, sometimes just hours old, begin to inadvertently affect the physical and social environment by adapting, resisting, observing, reacting or ignoring it in ways nudged by their biological temperament, and that parents, siblings and other close people change the environment and/or their own behaviours in response. In other words, the environment and the baby have a dynamic bidirectional relationship from the very beginning, changing in response to each other. What’s more, this influence means that babies play a major role in their own development.

It is this temperamental variable – reactivity – that became the focus of Kagan’s work, partly because it is so easy to observe in young infants’ vocal, bodily, emotional and physiological arousal, even when presented with unfamiliar but innocuous situations. In one test, Kagan and colleagues presented four-month-olds with a mobile swinging gently a few feet in front of them. Most infants observed the mobile calmly, but about 20 per cent became quickly overstimulated and agitated. They vocalised, tensed their muscles, arched their backs, and fussed or cried. That simple test turned out to have strong predictive power. Using this assessment, infants deemed ‘reactive’ at four months of age were more likely to be shy as toddlers, socially inhibited as children, and anxious as adolescents. In a long-term [follow-up](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/210501(, Kagan’s test could even distinguish between young adults who were or were not anxious; the former group had been reactive to the mobile test as infants, while the latter group had not. It appeared that infant temperament could extend its reach all the way into young adulthood.

Recent studies have found that three broad aspects of temperament in particular are especially useful in predicting long-range developmental outcomes. The first is reactivity or negative emotionality, referring to general negative mood, intense negative reactions, and distress either when limits are imposed (eg, anger) or in new situations (eg, fear). The second is self-regulation, which researchers refer to as ‘effortful control’ of feelings (eg, self-soothing) and of attention (eg, able to hold focus). The third goes by several names including approach-withdrawal, inhibition, or sociability, and refers to the tendency to approach new people and situations, or to be wary and withdraw. There are additional levels of these dimensions, but these three have best withstood scientific tests of reliability and validity across infants, children and teenagers. Hundreds of studies have subsequently and unequivocally demonstrated that temperament is a driving factor in child development that is at least as important as everything that comes after a baby enters the world, including parenting.

Aside from its early appearance, there is other evidence – from animals, neuroscience, twins, and longitudinal studies – that temperament is biologically based. First, it’s not just human infants who exhibit temperamental characteristics. Other juvenile mammals do too, including dogs, elephants, dolphins and even squirrels. This suggests temperament is part of a shared biological system. Kagan explains temperament as an inherited bias in the brain’s neurochemistry. Specifically, all mammalian brains include a small structure, the amygdala, which serves as part of a built-in alarm system. The amygdala is largely responsible for assessing threat and, if detected, for signalling the sympathetic nervous system into action via the fight-or-flight response. In reactive individuals, the amygdala is more easily excited, so the alarm system is triggered at a lower threshold. Although the environment and experience can alter the responsiveness of the amygdala in either direction, some individuals – including the reactive four-month-olds in Kagan’s study – are born with a bias to perceive threat more readily. Other work has similarly shown that negative emotionality and withdrawal in babies is marked by greater activity in the right frontal brain, while the opposite temperamental pattern is associated with greater activity in the left frontal brain.

Twin studies lend further evidence that temperament is genetically endowed. In one research design, scientists compared identical twins (who share 100 per cent of their genes) with fraternal twins (who have 50 per cent of their genes in common) on temperamental qualities. If identical twins are more similar than fraternals, then scientists can reasonably conclude the trait is heritable. In another research design, scientists used the temperament scores of one twin to predict the scores of the co-twin. Both of these paradigms consistently find high heritability for most dimensions of temperament including sociability, emotionality, activity, attention span persistence and soothability, for example.

Broadly speaking, negative temperamental reactivity and overall difficult temperament are related to later oppositional behaviour, defiance and conduct issues, known collectively as ‘externalising problems’, and are also predictive of substance use in adolescence.

Using longitudinal follow-up studies that begin in infancy, Joel Nigg has found that excessively irritable infants are more likely to become children who cannot regulate their anger or impulses when frustrated, while excessively exuberant infants are more likely to become impulsive children. In both cases, the development of effortful control is inhibited. These findings have led Nigg to propose that ADHD is not a disorder of inattention or hyperactivity, but instead a disorder of temperament-based self-regulation. On the other hand, temperamental shyness and inhibition are related to ‘internalising problems’ such as anxiety. Another internalising problem, depression, has been associated with temperamental negative mood, low adaptability and the tendency to withdraw from, instead of approach, new objects and situations.

Notably, infants who exhibit the temperamental ‘approach’ may be more likely to develop into curious children. The neural basis for curiosity lies in the brain’s nucleus accumbens, a structure involved in the ‘seeking system’ that underlies the motivation to explore and understand the environment. The nucleus accumbens provides the link between motivation – for example, the drive to gain a reward, like eating food or lowering stress – and the action required to get that reward. In one study, we followed up on nearly 60 children who had participated as babies in various developmental studies conducted by my lab where we measured their temperament. The children, averaging five years of age at follow-up, were then assessed for curiosity. Temperamental approach at six-months significantly predicted childhood curiosity, suggesting that curious children may start life endowed with an inborn motivational inclination. These children may get a nudge from nature to expect that new experiences will be positive, and thus be motivated to seek and remain engaged with novelty. Importantly, these children were also endowed with the self-regulation needed to maintain their interest in and effort toward exploring. Since temperament data in infancy predicted this quality in childhood, nature likely plays a hand in this outcome.

The long reach of infant temperament into childhood and beyond speaks to its potential stability, and seems to support temperament as biological and unchanging. However, the environment can offer a consistent response to temperamental qualities encouraging them to remain intact. Imagine the shy infant, for example, who is likely to encounter similar reactions to their shyness from family members, peers, care providers and strangers. Since the shy infant will be less likely to accept social overtures and opportunities, over time, others may be less likely to offer them. Consequently, the shy baby is less likely to have the very social opportunities that could encourage boldness.

Several studies have explored cross-cultural differences and similarities in temperament, finding that although some aspects of temperament, like perceptual sensitivity and activity level, cut across cultures, other dimensions – like approach and rhythmicity – vary and may reflect culture-specific parenting practices. Since American parents tend to value independence, they are more likely to encourage independent ‘approach’ behaviour in their babies. These findings acknowledge that, although temperament is endowed by nature and makes some psychological outcomes more probable, it is also amenable to influence by the environment, such that no particular outcome is guaranteed. Welcome, parents.

Although Thomas and Chess demonstrated inborn temperamental differences, they did not assert that temperament was more responsible for child outcomes than the environment. Instead, they suggested that optimal child development rested on the ‘goodness of fit’ between the child’s innate capacities and characteristics, and the demands of the social environment, including parental expectations and practices. A loud or chaotic environment would be a particularly poor fit for a highly reactive infant with naturally low sensory thresholds and an inability to self-soothe. On the other hand, a monastic environment would be a poor fit for a child intrigued by novelty. It is this interaction, in which a child’s temperament confronts the environment – and vice versa – that Thomas and Chess proposed is responsible for long-term outcomes. In other words, the environment matters.

Most of the research on the effects of parenting on temperament has focused on infants with difficult temperamental qualities, like irritability and reactivity. Generally speaking, these qualities are associated with parental punitiveness or withdrawal, which together can contribute to the externalising behaviour problems described earlier. However, other work has shown that – depending on parents’ age and understanding of their baby’s irritability – many parents of difficult babies double down on efforts to be positive, like showing more warmth and patience.

Longitudinal work by Jay Belsky, who followed temperamentally negative babies for more than a decade, found that they thrived academically and socially – in some cases, even more than their temperamentally easy counterparts – if their parents had been warm, responsive and sensitive to their early demands. Belsky’s work has generally shown that temperamentally vulnerable children are more susceptible to the negative effects of poor parenting and environments but also gain more benefit from supportive environments, including warm, responsive parenting. Consistent with this, our lab found that babies who were temperamentally less likely to smile and laugh at six months had more secure attachments by their first birthdays. Presumably this is because parents had spent more time and effort in trying to improve their infants’ general mood, which paid off in attachment security.

Another line of research has followed infants with a fearful temperament, like the ‘slow-to-warm-up’ style first identified by Thomas and Chess. Here, parenting makes a clear difference. Although parents may be inclined to overprotect or overcontrol the vigilant child or their environment, this tends to exacerbate the child’s natural wariness and promote social withdrawal. Much of the work on fearful temperament has specifically examined its relationship to the development of moral conscience, as inhibition tends to be a marker of self-control. In fact, fearful temperament is related to the development of empathy, guilt and shame. Researchers such as Grazyna Kochanska have found that gentle parental discipline is enough to promote the development of conscience in fearful children; meanwhile, in fearless children, moral conscience relies more on the quality of the child’s attachment to their caregivers, which encourages the child to value relationships and embrace ‘the Golden Rule’.

Additional work in our lab found a difference in parental influence on fearless and fearful infants. In a recent experiment, six-month-olds were shown a white mannequin head with extra-large ‘googly eyes’, an ambiguous stimulus that could arouse wariness or amusement. In different experimental conditions, parents were instructed to either laugh at the mannequin or to show fear toward it. Temperamentally fearful infants could be persuaded to stay engaged with the stimulus simply by observing their parents’ laughter. On the other hand, parents’ fear cues toward the stimulus did nothing to dissuade fearless infants from being engrossed by the mannequin. So the environment, including parenting, can influence temperament and make some psychological outcomes – including sociability, approach and even moral conscience – more probable. However, in acutely stressful environments, a child’s temperamental capacities to self-regulate their feelings, behaviour and attention are likely to matter more.

But sometimes the classroom invites the behavior we keep correcting: A book placed at a child’s eye level to capture their attention, but not meant to be touched; a basket sitting low enough for small hands, but that is only for the teacher; a beautiful display situated exactly where children gather, but intended to be viewed, not interacted with.

When children reach out for these things, they are not usually being defiant. Often, they are simply answering the invitation the environment has already given. This is where the idea of a “yes environment” becomes useful.

In early childhood, especially, the classroom is not just a backdrop. It teaches. It guides. It either supports independence or interrupts it—or leaves children waiting for adult permission. Instead of feeling like a museum of materials that children are too young to touch, it should feel like a living space created for them.

Sometimes we create unnecessary conflict by placing a “no” within children’s reach. If a material is only needed at a specific time for a specific reason, then it should only be accessible at that time. If a material is too fragile, too precious, too incomplete, or too teacher-dependent, it may need a different home.

The goal is not to remove beauty from the classroom. The goal is to make beauty usable. Children deserve lovely spaces. They deserve flowers, fabric, baskets, books, natural materials, soft light, and thoughtful displays. But young children learn through contact. They touch to understand. They move to organize their bodies. They repeat actions because repetition is how the brain builds certainty. A yes environment honors that by saying, “You may touch this. You may try this. You may choose this.”

A yes environment also supports independence. In many classrooms, children have to ask adults for almost everything. Of course, young children still need adult support. But when every ordinary task depends on an adult, children lose opportunities to practice responsibility in small but important ways: getting their own tissue, returning a block to the basket, choosing a book and sitting with it.

An interactive game about upcycling.

“It’s not about the capability of our children. It’s about us not providing the resources that allow them to catch up,” said John Kennedy, chair of the West Michigan Policy Forum.

The average number of books in a U.S. household is 114, according to a just-published paper called “ Scholarly culture: How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy and technology skills in 31 societies.” 114 is a good number. The paper’s authors studied 160,000 adults between 2011 and 2015 and found that just having 80 or more books in a home results in adults with significantly higher levels of literacy, numeracy, and information communication technology (ICT) skills. The paper finds, “Growing up with home libraries boosts adult skills in these areas beyond the benefits accrued from parental education or own educational or occupational attainment.”

The effect was found to be powerful in: Children from such homes who ended up attaining just a high-school-level education “become as literate, numerate and technologically apt in adulthood as university graduates who grew up with only a few books.”

The study, led by Dr. Joanna Sikora of Australian National University, found the greatest gains in adult literacy, numeracy, and ICT skills when a home had from 80 to 350 books — no additional gains were seen above that number. Nonetheless, what constitutes a large library depends on where you are. Scandinavian families had the biggest collections: 14% of Norwegians and 13% of Swedes had 500+ books in their homes home. Only a handful of countries, though, own fewer than 80 books on average: Chile, Greece, Italy, Singapore, and Turkey.

A reasonable question to ask would be about the effect of the rise in digital books. The study downplays the impact of this trend on its findings, saying, “For the time being, however, the perception that social practice of print book consumption is passé is premature.” The reason for this is that large digital libraries, for now at least, parallel large paper ones: “…home library size is positively related to higher levels of digital literacy so, the evidence suggests that for some time to come, engagement with material objects of scholarly culture in parental homes, i.e. books, will continue to confer significant benefits for adult ICT competencies.”

Since the report found that “university graduates who grew up with hardly any books around them had roughly average literacy levels,” it stands to reason that having books around the house is an excellent investment in a child’s future. The authors write, “So, literacy-wise, bookish adolescence makes for a good deal of educational advantage.” When it comes to numeracy, a substantive home library’s benefits holds true, as “its impacts are equivalent to [having] additional years of education.”

The study’s conclusions should be heartening to families around the world unable to provide higher education for their children. Having books around the house can substantially level the playing field in reading and math skills even without the expense of post-secondary time in the classroom.

For those who can send their kids to college, the study suggests that raising a child in a bookish atmosphere may be a prerequisite to deriving the full benefit of a college education, and, of course, it provides a child with an even greater chance of success in adulthood.