A few highlights from this recent talk by the inimitable Neil Gaiman:
The prison industry….found they could predict very easily [how many new cells to build], using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read…
There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different…
Fiction is a gateway drug to reading…
Fiction builds empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes…
The library is a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.
It gets better….read it here.