Why Our Futures Depend on Reading - Neil Gaiman

Neil Gainman - The Future of Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming

An article from 2013, these words still ring very true for our modern world.

Thoughts from Neil to ponder

• There is research that shows strong correlation between how many prison cells will be needed 15 years in the future and what percentage of 10 and 11 year olds who can't read.
• Reading "forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going (grit and perseverance to see what happens next and how the book ends!)
• "Words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far."
• Don't be a book snob and take out from the collection what you think is not 'good' for children. Your book taste is going to be different from others and that's ok. 
• "You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed."
• You learn that "The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different."
• "Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information."
• Librarians help people source the right information. They are also places you can still legally borrow books for free. 
• "We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different." 
• "Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

Where to next

I am obviously a lover of all things to do with books and reading and I promote it constantly to my class and the school through Whanau Time presentations. I am a huge believer in reading for pleasure. What better way to spend twenty minutes, or half a day!

• Words and new ideas build empathy and understanding that we are not all the same. This builds tolerance to people in the world around us and those in our daily lives. 
• I absolutely love this quote: "You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well". This is an important life skill to know, that some adults haven't quite got the hang of.
• I like his ideas about obligations to daydream, and it's easy to do this through reading a story or being read to. I love all the Kickstarter type websites out there, because they are full of people who have dreamed big dreams of something new, probably combined with some STEM skills. Books give us ideas about how we can create something new.
• Libraries are centres of literacy.