Dolly Parton was the heart and soul of East Tennessee. She loved the people of America in many ways, but one of her most cherished endeavors is the Imagination Library, which sends free books to children every month until they turn five.
Dolly started the Imagination Library in honor of her father, Robert Parton, an illiterate sharecropper. She intended to use the program to both encourage a love of reading in youngsters and spark their imaginations. What started as a local literacy program expanded throughout the South, across the country, and even internationally.
After Dolly’s passing on August 25, support for the literacy program has surged across the states. Alabama, for example, is offering a special license plate and sending $50 from each purchase to the Imagination Library. However, the plates won't even go into production unless sales top 1,000. At the beginning of last week, only 40 people had bought the specialty plate. By the end of the week, 550 plates had been purchased. Kaelyn Christian, the state's director for the Imagination Library, believes Alabama will not have any trouble hitting the 1000-plate goal by the end of the year.
In a time when reading literacy is at an all-time low in the U.S., the impact of Dolly’s Imagination Library is immense.
As of 2019, one in five American adults whose native language is American English cannot read well enough to "complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences," according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
This number does not even reflect the much more glaring crisis among our school-aged children. Reading Is Fundamental, a large literacy nonprofit in the U.S., found that 69% of fourth-grade children are reading below grade level. Children in the fourth grade should be reading books like Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn-Dixie and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but most are not even close. By the time American students reach the eighth grade, their illiteracy as a group increases to 70%. Ergo, most eighth graders cannot decipher the world of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
If children cannot read or properly understand those seminal books, how can they tackle the harder works by William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Homer, or Jane Austen? No wonder the à la mode generation wants to tear down the West. Most of them can't read, let alone understand, the literature that helped shape the modern world.
Dolly understood something that most teachers have known for a long time: The more books a preschool child has read (or the more they have been read to), the more ready they will be for learning once they reach school age. The real literacy gap starts with not reading to young children — but that gap doesn't have to exist. Just one book every night of a child's young life means they will hear millions of words and thousands of stories by the time they reach school.
Dolly's mission to get the reading train going for as many young children as possible is noble, and millions of children and underprivileged families benefit from it. Thank you, Dolly, from the bottom of our hearts.
