At American Eagle Institute, we believe that reading is the foundation from which a child grows to become an educated person. It is the key skill from which other language skills develop and is one of the greatest gifts we can pass on to our children.
One of the skills reading develops is empathy because reading allows us to see the world through another's eyes. With this knowledge comes responsibility. For almost 20 years at Eagle, an English education school in Taiwan and mainland China, we've insisted that schooling must include education of our character.
Although our curriculum can help with academic success, it's the role models and the community members at Eagle who help shape our students and represent our founding values of respect, honesty, and discipline.
Every child deserves a fair starting point
In 2016, the Chinese government began promoting several initiatives to improve literacy. These initiatives aim to promote reading excellence for everyone in China. But despite the efforts of many organizations, there remains a wide reading gap between urban and rural areas in China.
To add to the obstacles that Chinese families face when trying to promote reading excellence, academic pressure from regular schooling and other extracurricular activities make it even more difficult to increase time spent on reading for pleasure.
One of the founding values that American Eagle Institute was built on is that "every child deserves a fair starting point," and I'm proud to say that this year we initiated the Fall in Love With Reading project to help provide access to high-quality books to rural children and to help raise awareness for families in both the countryside and the city of the importance of reading.
Fall in Love With Reading is a charity project that revolves around the idea of improving literacy and providing better access to books for those in need. The project includes a reading seminar hosted by a linguistics expert from Massey University of New Zealand, a national bookmark making competition, a book donation drive, and the creation of a library in an underprivileged rural school with books from the donation drive.
As part of the drive, we ran two separate challenges that allowed our students across 80 campuses to accumulate charity points on line. The challenges were an online bookmark-making activity and a book reading challenge. Both activities included reading books in exchange for charity points. For every charity point raised, Eagle agreed to donate one Chinese yuan toward completing a library in a rural school in Hubei province.
We also invited influential organizations such as the International Literacy Association, McGraw-Hill Education, the Shanghai Foreign Language Bookstore, and Smiling Library to work in collaboration with Eagle to encourage more children to take part in the project.
Through bringing together the forces of our community, we hope to provide high-quality reading resources to rural children. At the same time, we can help students experience the gift of giving and cultivate their sense of social responsibility.
The magical power of charity
During the book donation drive, we experienced something bigger than simply accumulating books. We felt the power of communities pulling together to give to those in need. We saw our Eagle students thinking about those not as lucky as themselves. Some of them finished reading more than 300 books before we were even halfway through the reading challenge. Our thanks go out to all the wonderful families and caregivers who helped by setting great examples for the next generation.
After one month of collecting books, our students across the country donated more than 1,000 titles. On June 13, 2018, Eagle staff set out to bring this donation to Yu-Yan Elementary School in a village 750 kilometers away from Shanghai. Benjamin Spink-McCarthy, one of our teachers and trainers, ran an English class for their fifth graders. The class was interactive and immersive, and local teachers were there to observe and learn about a different way to teach English. With these high-quality English and Chinese books, we were able to create a library space for the school as well.
Literacy requires understanding and support
Reading requires a personal decision and a personal transformation that can be difficult to establish from commands or the forces of the marketplace. Only when society at large advocates for reading will we have a future where everyone enjoys and benefits from the power of reading.
The urgent need to improve literacy demands the attention of families and caregivers to make reading a priority in daily life and to encourage literacy from a young age. We call out to everyone to fall in love with reading and to make sure every child—from the cities to our most remote communities—has access to quality literature.
Emily Spink-McCarthy is president of American Eagle Institute, an English education school in Taiwan and mainland China.
This article originally appeared in the September 2018 issue of Literacy Today, ILA’s member magazine.