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

[Music] It'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 state where 62 percent." So it's not good anywhere.

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 professors' 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. When you met with the head of the Senate and several senators and the House, they gave us two counties in Florida and they said if you can get, you know, to get ATS, but if you get good numbers—if you get numbers in the sixties—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, everybody wins.

And you know, when I go and I talk to—when I will—when I 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 to sometimes now to prisons, and you know 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 the pretty good readers now, had they learned—had we, you know, got that percentage of kids reading at grade level up higher to the point where when 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, you know, ninth grade and you really—like Abraham—you know, you can't— you can't keep up. 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." It's just a disaster. And that's what I—I really mean it when I say, you know, 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.

And plus, you can improve the economics of the state. You're going to have that many more people who can go out into the workforce that have choices, you know; that's important, it's usually important things. And I think it's a—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, and I'd like to read." Because there are millions of kids running around this country right now, they do not like to read. They don't—they've been introduced to it incorrectly.

If we, you know, if we taught film to little kids and we started with Ingmar Bergman movies, they'll go, "I don't really like movies," you know? And unfortunately, that's what we do with kids in a lot of English classes. Let's go through with the—are a million rules that you need to learn, and that's not the most interesting thing. And then we're going to, you know, 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, you know, not like, you know, stuff, right? So something, you know, like the kind of food you can't remember whether you ate or not. I want to remember that they did—that they read a book—but that they want another book.

Yeah, I mean it's a tricky, dangerous time for—but you know, we need a literature.