Ah, vindication! One of the reasons we were attracted to the house we're in is that it has a small library. A room full of shelves -- and we had the boxes of books to fill them. But now I understand it wasn't just a simple matter of storage that made the house appealing.
According to a study in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, there is a correlation between academic performance and the number of books in the home. The study, spanning 20 years, involved more than 70,000 people in 27 countries.
A major finding: children in homes with more than 500 books spent more than three years longer in school and are 20 percent more likely to finish college than children in less book-centric families.
I guess the researchers are already trying to figure out how they can do similar studies in an era of Kindles and iPads.
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Fascinating!
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