A couple of days ago I talked about an article David Brooks wrote about kids being given books to read during the summer and how it helped their overall performance in school. I’ve also run across another article written by Laura Miller for Salon.com linking books and literacy.

Here’s an excerpt:

“A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.”

The whole article can be accessed here: http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/06/02/summer_book_giveaway.

For anyone who owns books or feels comfortable going into bookstores and libraries, it may be difficult to imagine living in a home without books. If you’d like to support organizations that can help put more books in more hands, the Campaign for Literacy page at Bookbundlz.com is a great place to find links to many of these types of organizations.