Literacy And Numeracy Quotes

scientific literacy and numeracy were not very good predictors of people’s beliefs about the risks of climate change. Instead, their beliefs were well predicted by their general cultural outlooks—by their tribal memberships (see

Submitting all of one's beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

Today we aren’t quite to the place that H. G. Wells predicted years ago, but society is getting closer out of necessity. Global businesses and organizations are being forced to use statistical analysis and data mining applications in a format that combines art and science–intuition and expertise in collecting and understanding data in order to make accurate models that realistically predict the future that lead to informed strategic decisions thus allowing correct actions ensuring success, before it is too late . . . today, numeracy is as essential as literacy. As John Elder likes to say: ‘Go data mining!’ It really does save enormous time and money. For those

Making is a form of thinking. It’s so important from an early age to encourage young people to make art and to look at art, and the fact that we would privilege numeracy and literacy over visual awareness is a sad indication of an increasingly corporate value system. We must give young, curious, inquiring minds the ability to have the confidence in their own perception. Treat your own response with more value than something you read in a book.

He signed documents only with a mark, suggesting that he could not write his name. “Most plain-dealing men in early modern England used marks because the majority of the population was illiterate,” explains the historian David Cressy. “More than two-thirds of men and four-fifths of women in the seventeenth century could not write their names.” Numeracy, not literacy, was needed to conduct business in Elizabethan England, and reading and counting were taught before writing, so some could read but not write. Of the nineteen elected officials in Stratford while John Shakespeare held office, only seven could sign their names. His wife could not write her name, either.

Peter de Mendelssohn, press officer for the British Control Commission, was entrusted with verifying the credentials of German journalists and organizing a free press in the British zone (Der Spiegel and Die Welt were considered reliable by their German readership). Equally significant was the contribution made by progressive educator Robert Birley, future headmaster of Eton, who reformed and restructured the German educational system. Literacy, numeracy and the core subjects had all been fatally neglected during the Hitler years, as National Socialist indoctrination took priority over the basic curriculum, leaving a generation semi-literate and woefully ill-informed.

What benefits did elementary school offer students, especially those of lower-class backgrounds? A human capital explanation of the advantages of education would typically focus on the technical and academic skills offered. In 1922, the school committee sent a questionnaire to employers asking what 14–16-year-old youth workers in continuation schools should be taught, inviting “any other suggestions which would enable us the better to serve the employers of Boston.” Their replies suggest that indeed, academic skills were important, but basic literacy and numeracy were prioritized over specific job-related skills.