At last . . .

As part of our effort to identify those activities which parents can undertake in the home that will likely predispose their children to becoming habitual and enthusiastic readers (Growing a Reading Culture - Just for Parents), I have for more than a year been searching for information about the number of books in the home and have always come up short. At last I have some answers. M.D.R. Evans, et al have published a paper (Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations) which provides some data, not just for the US but 26 other countries as well.

This is a very interesting report which validates much of the other research we had compiled on this issue. In Growing a Reading Culture - Just for Parents, we identified access to books as one of the five bedrock activities that have a material impact on children's predisposition towards reading. The answer regarding how many books the average American has in their home is - 112. The same number as the average for all twenty-seven countries in the study. Israel and Latvia come in at the top at 224 and 265 books in the average home. Mediterranean countries tend to be lower, as expected from other studies (in the 40-60 range), Scandinavian countries much higher (150-160), reflective of their much higher reading participation rates.

Only 3% of US homes indicate that they have no books, which is better than some of the indicative evidence I had seen. Still, nearly fifty percent of homes have fewer than 25 books in them. 18% of homes have more than 500 books.

Some of the interesting observations and conclusions from the study:

Where do libraries come from - who acquires a large library? The answer is unequivocal: a taste for books is largely inherited (Fig. 6 and Table A.8, column 7). Parents' library size is by far the dominant influence on one's own home library size, .62 in standardized terms (see also Crook, 1997a). Importantly, once other factors are taken into account, education, occupational status, and class are irrelevant. Prosperous people buy more books, although not a lot more.

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Thus it seems that scholarly culture, and the taste for books that it brings, flows from generation to generation largely of its own accord, little affected by education, occupational status, or other aspects of class.

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First, because scholarly culture provides skills and knowledge that are central to literacy and numeracy, and hence valuable in schools everywhere, it implies that parents' participation in scholarly culture will enhance children's educational attainment in all societies, net of the parents' formal education and social class (Hypothesis 1). As we have seen, the evidence strongly supports this hypothesis. Moreover it also suggests that social and economic policies have little effect on the advantages conferred by scholarly culture; instead, the advantage is large in all nations, at all times, under all political regimes.