April 23 of this year is the 25th World Reading Day. We are glad to see that nationwide reading is becoming a social fashion which is heading for “happy” reading.

However, we also objectively see that the population in rural areas, towns and counties which accounts for 39.4% of China’s total population is not active in the nationwide reading, both due to lack of resources as a result of economic underdevelopment and low reading awareness. Heungkong Charitable Foundation has been focusing on rural education for more than ten years, sticking to providing helps and supports for changes and growth of education and children in rural areas through the form of reading. In March 2020, Heungkong Charitable Foundation conducted an online questionnaire survey in 21 primary schools in poverty-stricken towns in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hubei, Hebei and Fujian provinces, and 12,584 questionnaires revealed:

01 Almost 60% primary school students in rural areas have no idea about extracurricular reading

02 Almost 80% primary school students in rural areas spend less than 30 minutes on extracurricular reading

03 Almost 70% primary school students in rural areas have read less than 5 extracurricular books in each semester

04 Parents generally think the factors affecting extracurricular reading of primary school students are reading environment and lack of reading skills

05 Parents are in great need of scientific reading methods

06 Most parents are willing to make efforts to improve scientific extracurricular reading for their kids

Based on the above findings, we have conducted horizontal comparisons in several dimensions, and found that good reading habits of parents have obvious positive correlation with development of good reading habits of children. Parents who have good reading habits are more willing to proactively read books together with their children, while parents who do not have reading habits rely on external resources and rules of schools to make their children to read books.