Let me continue on the theme of reading, the love of reading, the absolute value of reading in a child’s life. A child who develops a love of reading wins a prize that will last and last until the end of life. Learning to read confers the magic of an extraordinary new power. Alberto Manguel, in his fascinating book A History of Reading, remembers the exact moment when he first knew he could read. He was four, riding in a car, and he spelled out a billboard slogan for himself. “It was like acquiring an entirely new sense,” he tells us. “Since I could turn bare lines into living reality, I was all-powerful.”
At the most practical level, a love of reading gives a child an advantage in getting a good start in education and subsequently doing well in examinations throughout school and university. Learning to read well, and then making the reading of books a treasured habit, gives the child a strong base on which can be built high standards in all subjects. I guarantee that the top students of CSEC, the scholarship winners at Advanced Level, with hardly a single exception, developed a love of reading early on in their lives. Parents, as well as children, would do well to remember that simple fundamental fact. Reading strengthens comprehension. It teaches how to compose thoughts and express ideas. It forms in the mind habits of organising information in an intelligible and interesting way.
All these are abilities which benefit the scientist, the accountant, the chemist, the engineer, the doctor, the mathematician, the businessman, the agronomist, the computer technician, and the lawyer as much as they benefit the student of literature, the artist or the historian. Learning to read well, making it a lifetime habit, gives the workman of the mind a tool for all tasks. In any country, nothing is more important than getting all the children in all the schools and in all the homes to learn to read as a matter of daily routine, like eating, like sleeping, like running out to play.
