There was an article a few days ago in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, published as a daily in Rome, about the percentages of 10 year olds who read. Essentially this was a statistical breakdown of how much reading is done by this age group across the world. I was surprised that the United States did not rank within the top twenty countries.

We all know how important reading is to the development of what the critic Northop Frye called “the educated imagination.” Reading is one of the few activities that forces the thought process to unfold in a systematic and linear manner. The process of moving from one word to another, from one sentence and one paragraph, and so forth, makes us hold one piece of a thought while other pieces are then added onto the initial premise. If the passage is dense enough, then the reader weaves his or her way through the thought process to some kind of conclusion. Reading transcends the quick and often spurious “thought image” found in the sound bite.

In the reading process, the reader encounters and must decipher “signs,” semiotics for the literary critic. All life revolves around the decoding and understanding of signs. Music, art, mathematics, religion science, literature, economic–all that we engage in an intellectual manner–requires us to understand the signs and symbols of human (and sometimes non-human ) expression. The French critic Derrida was on to something when he wrote about the grammar of human life as the interplay of sign and interpretation within a recognized and shared field of thought.

For children, reading plays an important role in not only the development of the skill of “reading” but also in the lifelong process of managing in a world of “signs” to be read, decoded, and interpreted. What is critical thinking but the ability to understand the signs of an argument? What are science and math but the arrangement of signs as a way of understanding reality?

Children who read daily have a greater opportunity to develop the skill of reading itself and of learning more about decoding signs within the reading. For example, a child who reads about a character that has various experiences while moving from place to place may begin to understand or decode that there are elements in traveling, of making a journey, that tell us something about character; when that child-reader encounters several stories about making a journey and recognizes that the idea of a journey can mean having experiences that lead to understanding, then the child-reader (or the adult-reader) has learned about plot and narrative and also about decoding the significance of plot and narrative.

All of us should read every day; all of us should encourage our children to read every day; all of us should insist on genuine thought in school, in the workplace, and in the political discourse to which we are subjected every few years. Genuine discourse results from genuine thought. Let’s demand it from ourselves and from others.