The huge social impact of learning to love books | James Patterson

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There’s a program that I’m involved with at the University of Florida, right now Florida the percentage of kids reading at grade level is 43 percent. The best in the country is Massachusetts at 62 percent so nobody should be standing up and going look at our stay we’re 62 percent. So it’s not good anywhere. The University of Florida has been working on a program for five years up in the Gainesville area, not Gainesville itself because there are too many professor’s kids in the town, but outside and they have it up into the 80s. So I’ve been working with them and we went to the state legislature in April and we met with the head of the senate and several senators and the house and they gave us two counties in Florida and they said you don’t have to get 80s but if you get good numbers you get numbers in the 60s we will take that program across the state, which would be spectacular. It’s a win/win/win for the kids, it’s a win for the teachers, it’s a win for the state. Everybody wins. And when I go and talk to the legislature and when I go in and talk to big groups of librarians or teachers I’ll always say I’m here to save lives. And I really want people to get that in their heads because that’s what’s happening.
I go sometimes now to prisons and primarily what you’ll find there are a lot of relatively young African-American kids, and most of whom didn’t read at all in high school or almost none, weren’t good readers; now they read like crazy because it’s the only thing they can do. And the irony is incredible. Most of them are pretty good readers now. Had they learned, had we got that percentage of kids reading at grade level up higher to the point where they got to high school they were competent readers they might have stayed with it. But if you get to high school, you get to the ninth grade and you are really like, “A-bra-ham Li—,” you know, you can’t keep up here, and you go “I can’t do this. It’s not relevant, I can’t do it, so I’m not going to stay here, I’m not going to stay in school,” which is a disaster. And I really mean it when I say that we can save lives—and thousands of lives. If we do this thing in Florida we will save thousands of lives in Florida. And any state that can solve the problem is going to save thousands of lives. Plus you can improve the economics of the state because you’re going to have that many more people who can go out into the workforce, that have choices. That’s important. It’s a hugely important thing.
And I think it’s kind of a sacred mission. I have an imprint at Little Brown called Jimmy Books and our mission, which is—I think kind of simple but I think it’s smart—is when a kid finishes a Jimmy Book they’ll say, “Please give me another book,” as opposed to, “I hate books. I don’t like to read.” Because there are millions of kids running around this country right now that do not like to read, they’ve been introduced to it incorrectly.
If we taught film to little kids and we started with Ingmar Bergman movies, then they’ll go “Oh I don’t really like movies.” And unfortunately that’s what we do with kids in a lot of English classes! Let’s go through a million rules you need to learn, and that’s not the most interesting thing, and then we’re going to make you read a lot of stuff that isn’t really relevant to you yet or you’re not really that interested, and then you wonder why kids are going, “I don’t like to read.” Because you’re introducing it to them badly. So I want to try to make sure that what we do that they’re going to love the stories and at the end of it they’re going to say “give me another book.” Not junk, not like the kind of food you can’t remember whether you ate or not; I want them to remember that they read a book, but that they want another book.