Everything is terrible, obviously, and I have been getting particularly fed up with the general state of literacy I’m seeing in the world. And considering that for some reason my video about the Foo Fighters history of AIDS denialism is currently making the rounds, I figured that today I should talk about Dolly Parton. Yeah that’s right, it’s a Dolly Parton takedown video. No, obviously I’m kidding. I want to talk about Dolly Parton because she’s the absolute best and I want to talk about something good in this world. People love getting on social media and making lists about celebrities who are universally beloved, like Keanu Reeves and Mr. Rogers and I’m here to tell you that if your list doesn’t include Dolly Parton, you should throw that list in the trash because not only does everyone love Dolly, but they are 100% correct to do so.
It’s not just that she’s talented, but she is: she wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You. IN THE SAME NIGHT! You know what I accomplished last night? A sudoku. It was really tough.
Dolly Parton has sold more than 100 million records, recorded 25 Billboard number one singles, hit the top country music charts in every one of the past SEVEN DECADES, won 11 of 55 Grammies, and got two nominations for Oscars and one for a Tony and one for an Emmy. Also over and above all that, she has a lichen named after her.
That talent and success alone would make her universally beloved provided she just smiled and kept her mouth shut for the rest of her life. Know what I mean, JK Rowling?
But Dolly didn’t just lock herself away in a mansion and enjoy her success. She publicly supported same sex marriage before it was legal in the United States, and in 2023 she told Billboard that that when it comes to a person’s gender identity, others should respect that “that’s who they are.”
She’s also directly saved lives by giving a million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to develop the COVID vaccine, and was one of the first people to be vaccinated to demonstrate that it was safe and effective.
She’s done a shit ton more advocacy work but as I hinted at the start of this video, I’d like to focus specifically on how she has single-handedly improved literacy rates worldwide. Dolly has spoken often of her childhood, as one of twelve children growing up in a one-room shack in Tennessee. She has said that her father was one of the smartest people she knew, despite the fact that he was illiterate. That inspired her to create Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a nonprofit that since 1995 has sent free high quality age-appropriate books to children regardless of their family’s income. From birth until the age of 5, kids who are in areas that are served by local partners get a free book in the mail every single month.
(By “served by local partners,” I mean that Dolly Parton’s organization covers all the administrative expenses (overhead, selection of books, database, publisher negotiations, and fulfillment), while a local partner program covers the cost of the books and postage.)
I wanted to talk about this now not JUST because it’s a happy story, but because a recent study illustrates just HOW happy of a story it is: Dr. Claire Galea, Head of Research at United Way Australia, surveyed more than 86,000 caregivers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, and followed families over a 12?month period after they had received at least 10 Imagination Library books to try to quantify the effects of shared book reading, in which an adult reads books to one or more children.
A word of warning at the start, here: as far as I can tell, this particular worldwide study has not yet been peer reviewed. However, it’s a follow up to a smaller study that has been peer reviewed and was published last year in the Journal of Research in Childhood Education. In that smaller study, Galea and her colleagues surveyed hundreds of Imagination Library recipients in Tamworth, Australia and compared their experiences to the average Australian child, finding that kids who participated in the program were “read to more frequently, for longer durations, and had more books in their homes than the average Australian child. Tamworth caregivers who read to their child at least once a day were nearly five times more likely to read daily after six months and three years than those who did not read daily. Further, children who were read to daily at three years showed more emerging literacy skills than those who were not read to daily.”
Those promising results are why they expanded to look at the program’s impact worldwide, and what they appear to have found is stunning: as summarized by the Imagination Library, kids who had received just ten books from the Imagination Library were “four times more likely to demonstrate stronger emerging literacy skills—such as vocabulary and phonological awareness—compared to children not in the program.”
Kids in the program were “9x more likely to be read to 4 or more days per week…9x more likely to be interested in books and 15x more likely to join in during shared book reading compared to children not in the program.”
Additionally, caregivers in the program “were 6x more likely to count images, 7x more likely to describe images and 4x more likely to let the child hold the book compared to caregivers not in the program,” thanks to tip sheets the organization sends along with the books.
Again, this does need to pass peer review, but I think it looks promising that an act as simple as sending families free books can have such a dramatic positive effect on literacy, especially for those who otherwise might not have the advantages someone like me had, growing up in a family that could both afford books and valued reading from an early age.
Obviously, free public libraries are an important resource to help even our poorest kids get their hands on books, but here in the US, they’re already understaffed and lack funding, and Trump has been fighting to dismantle them entirely. And as of this reporting, even New York City’s new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, seems to be breaking his promise to keep libraries funded, proposing even less funding than his predecessor while only a handful of libraries are even able to stay open seven days a week.
Even if we had proper funding for our public libraries, actually getting books directly into kids’ hands solves problems like parents who are unable to find time to take their kids to the library, and the tip sheets help educate caregivers on simple, science-backed actions they can take to give their kids a headstart on a lifetime of loving books and learning.
Again, yes, this is something our governments can and should be doing, but they aren’t. The billionaires obviously aren’t stepping up, and are by and large spending more money bribing the Trump Administration than they are actually contributing to charity. So let’s just take a moment to be grateful that even though we’re in such a terrible timeline, at least we’re in it at the same time as Dolly Fucking Parton.
