Why our future depends on reading

So, I'm going to talk with you about reading and that reading fiction and reading for pleasure is one of the most important things in a person’s life.

And I am obviously very biased, because I am a writer, author of literary texts. I write for both children and adults.

Once I was in New York and heard a conversation about building private prisons - this is a rapidly growing industry in America. The prison industry must plan its future growth - how many cameras will they need? What will be the number of prisoners in 15 years? And they found that they could predict all this very easily, using the simplest poll-based algorithm, which percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds cannot read. And, of course, he cannot read for his pleasure.

There is no direct dependence on this; it cannot be said that in an educated society there is no crime. But the relationship between the factors is visible. I think the simplest of these connections come from the obvious:

Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two purposes:

Firstly, it reveals to you a dependency on reading. The desire to find out what will happen next, the desire to turn the page, the need to continue, even if it will be difficult, because someone is in trouble, and you have to find out how it all ends ... this is a real drive.
The simplest way to grow literate children is guaranteed - to teach them to read and to show that reading is a pleasant pastime.
There are no bad authors for children if children want to read them and are looking for their books, because all children are different.
And the second thing that fiction does is that it breeds empathy. When you watch a TV show or movie, you look at things that happen to other people. Fiction is something that you produce from 33 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, you alone, using your imagination, create the world, inhabit it and look around with prying eyes.
In 2007, I was in China, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention. At some point, I asked the official representative of the authorities: why? After all, the NF was not approved for a long time. What changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese created great things if they brought schemes. But they didn’t improve or invent anything. They did not invent. And so they sent a delegation to the United States, to Apple, Microsoft, Google and asked the people who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that they read science fiction when they were boys and girls.

The surefire way to destroy children's love of reading is, of course, to make sure that there are no books nearby. And there are no places where children could read them. I got lucky. When I was growing up, I had a great regional library. I had parents who could be persuaded to drop me in the library on the way to work during the holidays.

Libraries are freedom. Freedom to read, freedom to communicate. This is education (which does not end on the day we leave school or university), it is leisure, it is a refuge and it is access to information.

I think that it’s all about the nature of the information. Information has a price, and the right information is priceless.

In recent years, we have moved away from a lack of information and have come to its glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, now every two days the human race creates as much information as we produced from the beginning of our civilization until 2003. This is about five exobytes of information per day, if you like numbers. Now the task is not to find a rare flower in the desert, but to find a specific plant in the jungle. We need help with navigation to find among this information what we really need.

Books are a way to communicate with the dead. This is a way to learn from those who are no longer with us. Mankind has created itself, developed, generated a type of knowledge that can be developed, and not constantly memorized. There are tales that are older than many countries, tales that have long survived the cultures and walls in which they were first told.

If you do not value libraries, then you do not value information, culture or wisdom. You drown out the voices of the past and harm the future.

We must read aloud to our children. Read to them what pleases them. Read them stories we are already tired of. Speak different voices, interest them and not stop reading just because they themselves have learned how to do it. To do reading aloud with a moment of unity, a time when no one is looking at the phones, when the temptations of the world are set aside.

We must use the language. To develop, to learn what new words mean and how to apply them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. All of us - adults and children, writers and readers - must dream. We have to invent.

We must make things beautiful. Not to make the world uglier than it was before us, not to empty the oceans, not to pass our problems on to future generations. We must clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children in a world that we so stupidly ruined, robbed and mutilated.

Once, Albert Einstein was asked how we can make our children smarter. His answer was simple and wise. If you want your children to be smart, he said, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be even smarter, read them even more tales. He understood the value of reading and imagination.

I hope that we can convey to our children a world where they will read, and they will be read where they will imagine and understand.

Posted by: Neil Gaiman