What is the goal behind World Book Day 2022?
By: Anjali 10.3
Every year on or around World Book Day, our school celebrates it with a special Regents event called Litfest: students and teachers dress up in costumes to represent some of their favourite literature characters, whether they are from classic novels or comic books. Essentially, the whole idea of LitFest is to help people express themselves. However, the inspiration behind the creation of World Book Day and the cause that Regents supports is a lot more substantial and meaningful than most students know.
The event was originally started by UNESCO in 1995 to encourage children around the world to discover new books and grow their enthusiasm for reading. But over the last 27 years, it has been established by a myriad of major organisations, companies, schools, universities, and other educational facilities who use it as a method to inspire their members or students to incorporate the knowledge and passion they gained from reading into day-to-day activities. And while dressing up is evidently an enjoyable aspect of Lit Fest, the primary motivation is to help students like us celebrate and embrace their love for reading, putting aside where we are from or how old we are.
In addition to this, the official UNESCO website claims that Lit Fest is of even more importance this year, considering the pandemic, lockdown and inevitably repeating isolation periods:
“During the last year when most countries have seen periods of confinement and people have had to limit their time spent outside, books have proved to be powerful tools to combat isolation, reinforce ties between people, expand our horizons, while stimulating our minds and creativity. In some countries the number of books read has doubled.”
Although World Book Day is predominantly celebrated in highly fortunate schools like ours, with the theme of “You Are a Reader,” World Book Day 2022 has a specific focus on reaching out to underprivileged children from disadvantaged backgrounds in order to ensure that as many children as possible has access to their own books, illustrating clearly that Lit Fest has a much deeper aim than what we know.
At our school, Lit Fest was a continuous, full-week event; beginning on Monday, 28th February and ending on Friday, 4th March. On Thursday, 3rd March, we celebrated World Book Day 2022 by dressing up as our favourite book characters. By doing this, not only did we provided the opportunity to enjoy and share our chosen stories with classmates but were also being allowed to be a part of an activity indirectly supporting UNESCO becoming one step closer to delivering every child- regardless of their cultural background, their financial situation, their abilities or any other such factor- an equal and complete education. Other activities included the Lit Fest reading challenge and the Slam Poetry competition, which many students took part in to further celebrate World Book Day.
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