I remember “Read to Succeed” was once the theme of the activities and exhibitions organised to celebrate the work of library services for the children of Guyana.
It will always be a good theme: “Read to Succeed.” I remember reading an interview with the girl who topped the list of all West Indian students in one year’s CXC exams. When she was asked what she thought accounted for her outstanding success, she didn’t go into a long explanation of how well she had been taught at school or how hard she had studied, though I am sure these were important factors in her success. She simply said that she had done well because she had grown to love reading when she was very young and had read a lot ever since and she thought that had formed her mind the right way.
That was an excellent answer. First of all, reading tunes the mind for success in a child’s educational career and then, later, in the work he or she pursues in life. I have often said that if you check the top students in the CXC exams, in any subject, you will find, for sure, that they all enjoy reading and read a lot – not just their school books but books in general. Reading prepared their minds for success.
This is something worth emphasising – reading prepares the mind to think intelligently and to express information and ideas in an orderly and understandable manner. Reading makes for success in life not just because through reading you absorb knowledge, which is useful in passing exams or in doing jobs well. Perhaps even more importantly reading forms the mind, gives it a clear thinking ability, and shapes a child’s intelligence, so that the child who reads can use his or her inborn mental abilities more effectively than the child who does not read. In children of equal intelligence, the child who loves reading will always do better than the one who has not learnt to enjoy books. “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.
