I was very happy and honored to create the Professor Garfield Foundation with Ball State to make reading fun.
It would probably surprise people how prevalent reading is in institutions - and the degree to which some states discourage reading by instituting draconian rules and laws that try to limit and outright roadblock books in prisons.
Let's put in place programs to ensure that all of our children are reading by third grade.
Unfortunately, a lot of kids don't read anymore. I don't know what we can do about that.
There's a kind of funny gap between 14 and 20 when young people don't read very much. Nobody really knows what to do about it, although we've tried to reach these dropout readers with the 'young adult' book.
We need good reading programs, and we need equity in schools.
I think that it's not enough to do the little Band-Aid things of having celebrities come and read to children. Not that we don't need to read to children, but we don't need to just do it one time and feel good about it. I think we need to think long range about poor people and their relationship to libraries.
The City That Reads
There is a crisis involving reading in certain communities.
Public swimming pools, recreation centers, summer reading programs, youth jobs programs - they are all shutting their doors. And they are all facilities and programs relied on most heavily by low-income children.
