Read to Succeed

“Read to succeed” is an absolutely true statement.

However, a love of reading means much more for a child than simply giving him or her a head start in school work, in passing exams, and in a future career. It is a blessing for the whole of life in ways that go well beyond the short-term benefits in school, university and work.

I have said many times that if parents had one gift to give a child, and only one, the gift should be a love of reading. That is a gift which incomparably combines immense usefulness with life-long access to intellectual stimulation, emotional delights, spiritual inspiration and unceasing entertainment. With such a gift a child is bestowed for life with an eternal charm against boredom, against loneliness, and against ignorance – all afflictions that haunt the world too much. It is a gift which lasts forever and never grows out of date. It is a gift which increases in value as the years go by.

I can speak from personal experience. I was fortunate to be given books to read when I was very young and from early on got the taste for reading. Since then, reading has never failed me as a constant joy. Indeed, as I grow older and older, the greater is the pleasure which reading gives me. Nothing is sweeter than to rest peacefully in a Berbice chair on one’s verandah with the wind off the sea and to take up a book and know what pleasures of the mind, what stimulation of the spirit, beckon for the next hour or two. It is time at its immortal best. The imagination fills with a whole series of lives and ideas, old delights, new departures, fresh challenges, and eternal truths.

A supplementary point I wish to make concerns teaching the child who reads to take an interest also in writing. The two go together like the green forest and cool creek water. Learning to write well follows from learning to read well and can be practised without the writing becoming a chore. Suggest, for instance, that a child keep a diary, writing down what interests him or her from time to time as the days pass. Naturally, no such thing should be forced – but I have known children who have grown to enjoy writing a diary as the spirit moves them and the practice they get in expressing themselves that way serves them well as they grow into students at school and university.

I have written often about my love of libraries and my deep admiration for the dedicated work librarians do. Along with our teachers and our nurses, librarians are at the top of the list of our most valuable citizens. The work the National Library does in providing books and library services for our children has a value which we can hardly measure and never succeed in appreciating enough. Those who work in that vineyard, their souls should be saved in paradise. Every child taught to love reading is a child not only equipped to succeed but is a child whose life will be richer by far as long as he or she lives.