Illiteracy isn’t just an inconvenience, according to the National Literacy Institute. It’s a national emergency.

According to recommendations recently made to President-Elect Obama’s education advisors, the U.S. is facing an unprecedented literacy crisis that reflects a need for the nation to invest in early education programs and make language development a primary focus of every preschool.

But Micah Linton, author and artist of weebeasts, from Beast Stew/Greenleaf Book Group Press believes that we can help stem that tide by offering children more complex books for early childhood reading. His premise is that young children are like sponges, and can absorb more information and concepts than their older counterparts. In addition, by engaging younger children with more complex stories and concepts, we better prepare them for the more intricate stories they’ll encounter in their secondary school career.

“Young children are smarter than we give them credit for being,” Linton said. “When we look at how younger children embrace the larger universes of Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, it’s easy to see that they can understand stories originally written for much older audiences. So, why not write similar stories for their reading levels, from early childhood on up? It’s been proven that parents help their children much more by using plain language with them than they do when they use baby talk, so why do we feel compelled to ‘dumb down’ what they read in younger years? It’s time we recognize what researchers and scientists have been proving in studies for decades – that young children can absorb information at a much faster rate than older children, and they can retain more of it.”

The interesting thing, according to Linton, is that sometimes the marketers seem to know more about how smart kids are than educators do.

“Although the stories are aimed at older audiences, a lot of the licensing and merchandising is aimed at younger audiences, and they aren’t just attracted by the pictures and art – they know the characters and the stories,” Linton said. “They role-play the characters on the playgrounds and in the backyard, and they understand the contexts. However, young people don’t distinguish between learning and play, so we can use these entertainment franchises to lead them into stories with more complex themes and worlds as they get older.”

Linton believes that stories like Star Wars, in which the rebels could be likened to the early colonists and the empire to the British crown, can even help kids become more interested in their historical counterparts.

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