When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.
Interpretation
Encouraging reading to children should be enjoyable, not a chore.
This quote emphasizes that when encouraging parents to read to their children, it should be framed as a delightful activity rather than an obligation. Mem Fox uses the metaphor of chocolate to convey that reading should be a sweet experience, fostering a love for books and learning in children.
In practice
During a parent-teacher conference to emphasize the importance of reading.
If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.
The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.
Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
People from my sort of background needed Grammar schools to compete with children from privileged homes like Shirley Williams and Anthony Wedgwood Benn.
Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.
A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.
In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes.
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