As documented in Chapter Four, advice in support of the home library and children’s need for their own bookshelf echoed Hall’s recommendations along the same lines forty years earlier. The preservation of the ideal of family social reading and the home library were a level for preserving a “reading culture” as defined by middle-class Anglo-Saxon educators and researchers. The ideal of a “reading culture” spurred the development of the “home reading committee” struck by the Canadian Home School Federation campaign in 1951. According to the official history of that Federation (Mansfield, 2000), this committee aimed to “turn the attention of parents to the value of good literature and to the need to extend library services for children” (p. 2). Deverell, writing in the Canadian Home and School, challenged the popular view that the ability to read was a key to prosperity and an indicator of the amount of respect that should be accorded and individual. He argued that “this is surely a very limited value to place on reading” (1953, p. 17), and emphasized instead the cultural importance of reading books. While acknowledging that reading for work and to keep abreast of current affairs and sport news “had their place in our reading, these should not completely replace the reading of books, which really matter” (p. 17). Elsewhere, Deverell (1953) advised that the requisite home book shelf “should not include too many mysteries or romances” (p. 8). He asked: “Instead of comic book collections, why not encourage your boy to collect really worthwhile books with hard covers?” (p. 9)

Promoting a reading culture was also a means of regulating children’s reading. A November 1953 editorial in Parents’ Magazine highlighted the threats to children’s “good” reading posed by undesirable comics, which children were reading in ever-increasing numbers. However, the magazine’s proposed solution to this crisis involved taking advantage of the market for these comics by publishing its own more “wholesome” children’s comic series.

The Report of the Royal Commission on Education in British Columbia in 1960 also considered the out-of-school literacy activities of children a threat to the work of the school:

Some radio, television and moving-picture programs, as well as certain types of reading material, may undermine the efforts of the schools. The Commission considers that programs and reading materials stressing crime, vulgarity, and promiscuity are out of keeping with the purposes of education. Even in their least damaging forms they may lessen the influence of the schools and, as competing interest create a distraction from serious learning. (Chant, 1960, pp. 49–50)