Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer can’t perform enough | Commentary

Children growing up in poverty come to school with a vocabulary of about three hundred words. Children who grow up in a rich family come to school with a vocabulary of about three thousand words. With this research data, Hans Spekman, director of the Youth Education Fund, illustrates how poverty puts a child at a disadvantage very early on. It goes even further.

Poor socio-economic conditions lead to poorer sleep, affect what you eat and cause chronic stress. This has a negative effect on the brain development of a baby in the belly. In fact, even before birth, a child growing up in poverty is already at a disadvantage, says professor Nienke van Atteveldt. On Friday she will give her inaugural lecture at the Free University: Learning or Performing? How to connect neuroscience, education and society.

The Boekenbal will take place in Amsterdam on Friday evening, kicking off the Boekenweek. The party is known as a somewhat elitist party in the literary Netherlands. And yet it is good that there is an exuberant celebration by writers. Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer cannot act enough as the writer of the Boekenweekgift, even if he would only encourage one person to read. Reading can make all the difference.

Our own columnist Özcan Akyol, he wrote the Book Week essay in 2020, travels as a writer to schools all year round. He does everything he can to enthuse grumpy teenagers for reading. His own experience speaks volumes. He was not much of a reader for a long time. At home, in a family of migrant workers from Turkey, there were no books. He discovered reading when he was briefly imprisoned and he was killing time reading books, but also discovered a new world. The world of the imagination. Unlike Netflix series or computer games, letters don’t show what the world looks like. It outlines a story, but how it looks is up to one’s own imagination.

Akyol worked on that. By systematically increasing his vocabulary – he still reads at least one book a week – he developed into a writer, columnist and program maker. His children made it through 3000 words with ease when they started school. He passes on his knowledge. To his own children, and to other people’s children.

Reading expands the imagination. Everything is possible for those who read. If you increase the reading pleasure, you increase your chances. What a party!