I remember as a first year undergraduate visiting the home of friend in North London and being amazed at the number of books lining the shelves in the living room, piled up the stairs and filling the empty spaces on the kitchen tops. “So, you grew up amidst all these books. What a priviledge”. “Yeh, but I never read any of them”. The house had a certain ‘air’ to it, one where books were clearly central, not only as wallpaper, but as a manifestation of what was engaging, pleasurable, valuable. I was reminded of that visit when I came across a study about the effects of having a home library on the educational achievements of children. I just wish now that I’d actually counted the number of books in the house – though to be fair, that might have appeared a wee bit strange.

Not so strange though for the authors of a recent study published in the Journal ‘Research in Social Stratification and Mobility’. In it the authors claim that parents’ scholarly culture, measured by the number of books stacked in a home library, enhances their children’s educational attainment. That scholarly families nurture scholarly children doesn’t seem particularly contentious – it’s something that I’d intuited back then in North London. However, in correlating the number of years’ schooling with the number of books in the home regardless of social class, parents’ occupation, nationality, historical period or particular government education policies is surprising. The report states that:

in the US – where the advantage is relatively modest – a child whose parents have 500 books can expect to get about 2 or 3 years more education than a comparable child from a bookless home. The advantage in Australia and West Germany is similar; not far different in France; larger in Norway and Spain (4 or 5 years); and largest in China (6 or 7 years).

So, unschooled parents can offset the relative educational disadvantages accrued by their children in comparison to university educated parents by filling the house with books.

There are a couple of significant implications from this that go beyond my initial intuitions:

• any government that confines policies designed to improve student attainment to schools is missing a trick. Family culture – in particularly a book-buying family culture – can be a determining influence on the number of years that children stay in education.
• and if, as Vince Cable suggests, graduates earn on average £100,000 more than non-graduates in their life-time, those Oxfam purchases during the teenage years could turn out to be a pretty good investment.
• I now have an evidence-based reason for ducking out of household chores on a Saturday afternoon and sitting down with a good book. I’m investing in my daughter’s future by cultivating that scholarly culture which will maximise her educational attainment!

Clearly, lots of caveats and explanations are needed to arrive at the conclusion and the implications that emerge from it. And I have to admit, that last one failed miserably to convince my wife. [You can check those caveats and explanations by reading the whole article directly from mmu's elibrary or, if you are off-campus, via athens. Find help to do this here.] What is key throughout the paper is the emphasis placed on books as the means through which a scholarly culture is manifested. Books as a material presence is what counts – and what the researchers count.

But what is this scholarly culture that stands atop the mountain of volumes of fiction and non-fiction titles parents have amassed? It’s a way of life – related to books as material objects and activites such as reading and talking about books – which leads to children developing a toolkit of skills and understandings particularly apt for dealing with the kinds of tasks met in formal education. This is the argument that they present and although it’s endorsed by the numerous scholars they cite, there’s little flesh on its bones in the article itself.

If is meant the focused and immersive experience of delving into and staying with a book, emerging to critically appraise and talk about it, then yes, I certainly see the pleasure and value in that, and I do do it. So does my eight year-old and she doesn’t have to duck the housework! I’ve also followed literary traditions, ‘adopted’ great writers and ‘gurus’ and felt that I was entering distant worlds which questioned my values and understandings. But that’s just a part of it. I know. By now you’re probably screaming. And the Net?

To be fair, so was I as I read through the article which was increasingly looking like ‘A defence of the book in the face of the onslaught of the digital.’ Was no mention made of the internet, or the Kindle, the iPad or the Sony Reader because they can’t be stacked on shelves? Or is it that reading screens develops a different kind of cognitive toolkit which isn’t the most apt for scholarly attainment? And why the either, or? Isn’t a scholarly culture – that way of life – a fusion of the online digital reading (the spine tensed by sitting forward towards the screen) with the offline (the spine split between the hands sitting back into the chair)? And isn’t the management of that fusion the key cognitive skill that my own eight year-old will have to develop?

No, I don’t think books will disappear. There’s no reason why two technologies can’t sit together as the telephone and email do quite happily. What will disappear though is the measurement of educational attainment that fails to reference the digital, even if, as a minimum, it is controlled for in the kind of studies reported on here. We might not be counting Kindles yet but we’ll increasingly have to take account of them.

Addendum

I’ve just heard on the transistor radio that the sale of e-books seems to have hit a tipping point with Amazon reporting that it sold 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books in the second three months of this year.

Image by Flickr user Dammit Jack / Creative Commons licensed