Are public libraries saving money, or are they killing their futures when they eliminate children’s librarians? Are school boards saving money or squandering priceless opportunities when they eliminate budgets for books?

British reading specialist Aidan Chambers answers these questions by providing a clear picture of what is at stake, and what can be accomplished by a school community committed to turning children into avid life-long readers. Although designed primarily for elementary school teachers and librarians, anyone concerned with education can benefit from the practical advice contained in The Reading Environment: How Adults Help Children Enjoy Books, and its companion volume, Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk.

It is amazing how much information Chambers has managed to pack into these slim little paperbacks, especially The Reading Environment. The chapter headings and subheadings are so clear and specific that the table of contents is an index in itself. The book does not include lists of recommended books for children, but describes various ways schools can assemble and update good collections. This edition provides a list of review publications, but only American sources are listed. Canadian parents seeking this kind of information would do better to consult Paul Kropp’s The Reading Solution, or a children’s librarian – if they can still find one.

Devisers of curriculums are so cautious, so ignorant of what literature is for (see Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment), they think the Brothers Grimm are far too violent, and Hans Christian Andersen is too depressing. Consequently, most of the prescribed fare for young children is bland, and teachers, parents, and librarians have to make extra efforts to expose children to books that will really move them.

Chambers does not dwell on the mechanics of reading, but on reading as an act of imagination. To enjoy literature, it is not enough to translate marks on paper into units of sound and meaning. We have to “turn printed information into vivid drama” in our minds. The television viewer has only to press a button to bring a story to life. The reader is handed a playscript, and expected to direct the production and perform all the parts. We learn how to do this by listening to others tell stories and read books aloud.

Education administrators tend to dismiss books as old-fashioned and expensive, even though they are a superbly efficient and child-friendly way to store data: compact, lightweight, cordless, battery-free, impervious to magnetic fields, resistant to spilled cookie crumbs and beverages, almost unbreakable. Put them in your pocket, take them to bed. Unlike video display terminals, there is no evidence to suggest that prolonged exposure to books poses any health risk to pregnant women or growing children.

Dazzled by technology, we forget that the value of a learning tool is not measured by what it can do, but by what the learner can do with it. Often less is more. As Joseph Chilton Pearce points out in Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, when a child plays with a spool of thread, seeing it as a steamroller in his mind’s eye, more activity is going on in his brain than if he had a miniature replica of a steamroller to play with. Similarly, a child listening to a story or reading a book is performing more sophisticated mental functions than a child watching an audio-visual presentation.

Talking about books, articulating our likes, dislikes, puzzles, and perceptions, is such an important part of the reading process for children. This is partly because, in the words of an eight-year-old sage quoted in Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk, “We don’t know what we think about a book until we’ve talked about it.” Teaching children how to think, not what to think, guiding them in useful directions without limiting their explorations, requires enormous tact, skill, and lots of practice. Chambers uses transcripts of actual classroom discussions to illustrate this delicate process.

If Tell Me has a failing, it is Chambers’s unbridled enthusiasm for the ideas of French literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes. He chides “content-minded teachers” for ignoring the “truth” of Barthes’ pronouncement that “‘What takes place’ in narrative is, for the referential (reality) point of view, literally nothing; ‘what happens’ is language alone, the unceasing celebration of its coming.” Those who feel that literature is about life, not just language, will find this limits the book’s scope and appeal.

A child who enjoys reading has the power to live many lives, to step inside the skin of fellow creatures from different cultures, different centuries, different species, different planets. This is not only good for the mind, it’s good for the heart. Would politicians who as children sobbed over the fate of the little match girl be so quick to cut budgets for welfare and education?