Bibliocentricity has a powerful impact on children’s education throughout the world

From Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations by M.D.R. Evans, et al. Abstract.

Children growing up in homes with many books get 3 years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class. This is as great an advantage as having university educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father. It holds equally in rich nations and in poor; in the past and in the present; under Communism, capitalism, and Apartheid; and most strongly in China. Data are from representative national samples in 27 nations, with over 70,000 cases, analyzed using multi-level linear and probit models with multiple imputation of missing data.

This is excellent research working within the confines of the data available. The authors refer to scholarly culture as “the way of life in homes where books are numerous, esteemed, read, and enjoyed" which is what I have been referring to as bibliocentricity.

Scholarly culture has a powerful impact on children’s education throughout the world, in rich nations and in poor, under Communism and under capitalism, under good governments and under bad, in the present generation and as far back in history as now living memory can take us. It helps children from all levels of the social hierarchy, but especially those from the bottom. A book-oriented home environment, we argue, endows children with tools that are directly useful in learning at school: vocabulary, information, comprehension skills, imagination, broad horizons of history and geography, familiarity with good writing, understanding of the importance of evidence in argument, and many others. In short, families matter not just for the material resources they provide, not just because of parents’ formal educational skills, but also – often more importantly – because of the scholarly culture they embody.

This is the first, really robust evidence I have come across documenting 1) the importance of voluntary reading on life outcomes and 2) the universality of the importance of bibliocentricity across time, cultures, and circumstance.

One aspect of this is related to the idea described by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From; the adjacent possible (originated by Stuart Kauffman). The adjacent possible is the possible recombination of ideas and capabilities currently existing towards some next stage of development. You have to work stone before you can work metals. You have to work glass before you can build microscopes. You can't pass Go and collect $200, you have to work through the intermediate stages, always exploiting the range of possible combinations and ideas and capabilities to push the boundary outwards.

I suspect that one of the contributing factors in a book-rich household is something beyond simple knowledge acquisition via books and something beyond the simple fact of imbibing scholarly habits from parental example. A further factor may be that of cultivated serendipity, of the adjacent possible. In households with lots of books, a child can by choice and volition move from topic area to topic area (exercised choice being a critical psychological motivator) expanding their own cognitive adjacent possible. The act of such choice becomes exponentially greater when 1) there are a lot of books, and 2) when those books physically circulate within the home environment (creating a greater probability of connection). Where a child engages with a book of their own volition, there is something created beyond simply the acquisition of more knowledge - there is the skill of choosing and exploring.

This in turn implies that e-books should not and will not displace physical books for those in the formative years of developing the habit of reading, say 0-18. The creation of serendipitous connections for a child is just not as feasible in the virtual world as it is in the actual world of their home environment with real books.