Literacy Changing The World Quotes

I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.

The link between literacy and revolutions is a well-known historical phenomenon. The three great revolutions of modern European history -- the English, the French and the Russian -- all took place in societies where the rate of literacy was approaching 50 per cent. Literacy had a profound effect on the peasant mind and community. It promotes abstract thought and enables the peasant to master new skills and technologies, Which in turn helps him to accept the concept of progress that fuels change in the modern world.

Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang. In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At the same time, Korea had a much lower literacy rate than Argentina (which had one of the highest in the world) and about one-fifth the income per person; today it has three times as much. Further, over the same period, sub-Saharan Africa saw markedly increasing literacy rates, accompanied with a decrease in their standard of living. We can multiply the examples (Pritchet’s study is quite thorough), but I wonder why people don’t realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon here again.

We all know how it went when Europe changed from a culture addicted to depressants to one high on stimulants [...] Within two hundred years of Europe's first cup, famine and the plague were historical footnotes. Governments became more democratic, slavery vanished, and the standards of living and literacy went through the roof. War became less frequent and more horrible.

It takes a heavy commitment to quality education for all to avoid that stratification of society, those needless degrees of separation. But even the present-day United States has lost what commitment it used to have to free education of high quality. Anyone reading the annual surveys of science literacy (another example: fewer than half of Americans know that the earth orbits the sun once a year) has to wonder how badly most people are going to be left behind, further along into the 21st century, whether they too will become "stubborn, apathetic, and perverse" toward a scientific and technological world they must view as magical, beyond their comprehension, accessible only via the right incantations.

Two intellectual consequences of literacy were the separation of history from myth and the increased individualism based on highly specialized knowledge. In literate cultures, people are stratified on the basis of what they have read; academic disciplines and college majors are an obvious example of this kind of specialization.

The lift that comes from sending girls like Sona to school is stunning—for the girls, their families, and their communities. When you send a girl to school, the good deed never dies. It goes on for generations advancing every public good, from health to economic gain to gender equity and national prosperity. Here are just a few of the things we know from the research. Sending girls to school leads to greater literacy, higher wages, faster income growth, and more productive farming. It reduces premarital sex, lowers the chance of early marriage, delays first births, and helps mothers plan how many children to have and when. Mothers who have had an education do a better job learning about nutrition, vaccination, and other behaviors necessary for raising healthy children.

Sending girls to school leads to greater literacy, higher wages, faster income growth, and more productive farming. It reduces premarital sex, lowers the chance of early marriage, delays first births, and helps mothers plan how many children to have and when. Mothers who have had an education do a better job learning about nutrition, vaccination, and other behaviors necessary for raising healthy children.

It is almost impossible to imagine such a world today: one without books or calendars or accounts, never mind the Internet, one in which nothing has ever been documented and all the information that can be possessed is held in the minds of a few. But literacy has emerged only in the past five or six thousand years, and for most of human history this was how knowledge was stored and communicated. The advent of writing is often seen as one of the watershed developments in human history, and it can be argued that the presence or absence of writing shapes cultures in fundamental ways—some would even say it shapes consciousness itself. But even if that is too great a claim, it is certainly true that the ability to document what is known changes the way knowledge is constructed, including the kinds of information that can be transmitted and the shape that information takes.

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers… Parents and other passengers read on Kindles… Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing… As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago… My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading… Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19thand 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts… Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension: physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen’s group emphasize that the sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of “geometry” to words, and a spatial “thereness” for text. As Piper notes, human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology of recurrence”. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back.

Learning to read forms specialized brain networks that influence our psychology across several different domains, including memory, visual processing, and facial recognition. Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. A society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate would have, on average, thicker corpus callosa and worse facial recognition than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate. These biological differences between populations will emerge even if the two groups were genetically indistinguishable. Literacy thus provides an example of how culture can change people biologically independent of any genetic differences.

Let’s follow the causal chain I’ve been linking together: the spread of a religious belief that every individual should read the Bible for themselves led to the diffusion of widespread literacy among both men and women, first in Europe and later across the globe. Broad-based literacy changed people’s brains and altered their cognitive abilities in domains related to memory, visual processing, facial recognition, numerical exactness, and problem-solving. It probably also indirectly altered family sizes, child health, and cognitive development, as mothers became increasingly literate and formally educated. These psychological and social changes may have fostered speedier innovation, new institutions, and—in the long run—greater economic prosperity.25

What struck me first was the UN’s estimate that 850 million people in the world lacked basic literacy. I had to read the number three times to convince myself that it was not too large to be true. The world’s population was around 6 billion people. That meant one out of every seven human beings lacked the ability to read or write a simple sentence.

Of the 850 million lacking basic literacy, the UN estimated that two-thirds were women. This had a terrible carryover effect, as it’s typically the women who are rearing the family’s children. If the mother is educated, it is much more likely that education will be passed on to the next generation.

For many Jews during Talmudic times, conversion to Christianity prob- ably did not appear as a major change: Christianity looked like a slightly di erent version of the Jewish religion, with the same core belief in one God and the Torah but with fewer demanding requirements. For many Jewish households that earned their living from farming—and especially the poorer ones that struggled to support their families and, as illiterate, were made to feel like outcasts (ammei ha-aretz) by the local rabbis and lit- erate Jews—Christianity probably seemed a welcome change: it enabled them to believe in the same God without having to obey several costly norms, including the one that required fathers to educate their sons.

I believe we can change the world one letter at a time. Literacy isn't a noun, it's a verb meant to be a call of action~and every child deserves the chance to hold a book in their hands~and understand the power of the words resting in them.

One of the first tasks a writer faces is the need to form an ethos, a way of being in the world, that permits the writer to create and present to the world a dynamic speaking and writing self.

Less than a hundred years after the first Christian emperor, the intellectual landscape was changing. In the third century, there had been twenty-eight public libraries in Rome and many private ones. By the end of the fourth they were, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus observed with sorrow, ‘like tombs, permanently shut’. Was Christianity’s rise cause or mere correlation in this? Christian emperors would later struggle to increase literacy to ensure that the state even had enough literate functionaries. Certain fields of enquiry started to become not only off-limits but illegal. As a law of AD 388 announced: ‘There shall be no opportunity for any man to go out to the public and to argue about religion or to discuss it or to give any counsel.’ If anyone with ‘damnable audacity’ attempted to then, the law announced with a threat no less ominous for being vague, ‘he shall be restrained with a due penalty and proper punishment’.

Want to fix it all? Save the world? Change the system? Ensure progress? Get books into the hands of kids... and your work will be done.

Taking this class is a very significant act, and it’s not just about you. You’re also learning physical anthropology for all those friends, coworkers, family members, children, and partners who don’t have this opportunity. For two reasons, your education here is vitally important for others. First, as part of anthropology, physical anthropology will help you learn more about who you are as a biological being—as an animal, a vertebrate, a mammal, a primate, and as a human being, just for starters. Second, physical anthropology is a science. As citizens of our contemporary world, we are absolutely dependent upon science and technology for our survival, and yet, the rate of scientific literacy is appallingly low. Said another way, many people lack a true understanding of the most basic scientific concepts and methods. Still fewer could talk about evolution, natural selection, and adaptation with any degree of accuracy. Your presence in a physical anthropology class can help change that.

we proposed eighteen great ideas of science that we felt framed virtually all discoveries of the natural world and all advances in technology. We could not have foreseen many of the remarkable developments of the past two decades—nanotechnology archaea, LEDs, cloning, dark energy, ancient microbial fossils and deep microbial life, evidence for oceans of water on Mars and lakes of methane on Titan, ribozymes, carbon nanotubes, extrasolar planets, and so much more. But all of these unanticipated findings fit into the existing framework of science. The core concepts of science have not changed, and we are unable to point to any fundamentally new scientific principle that has emerged during the 1990s or 2000s. Accordingly, while every chapter has been significantly updated, we have added only a single new chapter on the explosion of advances in biotechnology. We conclude that the experience of the past two decades underscores the value of the great ideas approach to achieving scientific literacy.

Despite being the most protectionist country in the world throughout the 19th century and right up to the 1920s, the US was also the fastest growing economy. The eminent Swiss economic historian, Paul Bairoch, points out that there is no evidence that the only significant reduciton of protectionism in the US economy (between 1846 and 1861) had any noticeable positive impact on the country's rate of economic growth. SOme free trade economists argue that the US grew quickly during this period despite protectionism, because it had so many other favourable conditions for growth, particularly its abundant natural resources, large domestic market and high literacy rate. The force of the counter-argument is diminished by the fact that, as we shall see, many other countries with few of those conditions also grew rapidly behind protective barriers. Germany, Sweden, France, Finland, Austria, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea come to mind.

We often struggle to conceive of and describe the scope and scale of new technologies, meaning that we have trouble even thinking them. What is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought. A new shorthand is required, one that simultaneously acknowledges and addresses the reality of a world in which people, politics, culture and technology are utterly enmeshed. We have always been connected - unequally, illogically, and some more than others - but entirely and inevitably. What changes in the network is that this connection is visible and undeniable. We are confronted at all times by the radical interconnectedness of things and our selves, and we must reckon with this realization in new ways. It is insufficient to speak of the internet or amorphous technologies, alone and unaccountable, as causing or accelerating the chasm in our understanding and agency. For want of a better term, I use the word 'network' to include us and our technologies in one vast system - to include human and nonhuman agency and understanding, knowing and unknowing, within the same agential soup. The chasm is not between us and our technologies, but within the network itself, and it is through the network that we come to know it. Finally, systemic literacy permits, performs, and responds to critique. The systems that we will be discussing are too critical to be thought, understood, designed and enacted by the few, especially when those few all too easily align themselves with, or are subsumed by, older elites and power structures. There is a concrete and causal relationship between the complexity of the systems we encounter every day; the opacity with which most of those systems are constructed or described; and fundamental, global issues of inequality, violence, populism and fundamentalism, All too often, new technologies are presented as inherently emancipatory. But this is itself an example of computational thinking, of which we are all guilty. Those of us who have been early adopters and cheerleaders of new technologies, who have experienced their manifold pleasures and benefitted from their opportunities, and who have consequently argued, often naively, for their wider implementation, are in no less danger from their uncritical deployment. But the argument for critique cannot be made from individual threats, nor from identification with the less fortunate or less knowledgeable. Individualism and empathy are both insufficient in the network. Survival and solidarity must be possible without understanding.

Visual media are redefining what it means to develop the tools of literacy to understand a changing world—with regard not just to the reception of information but also to its expression

I call this “thinking from right to left.” But many other people working in different fields have identified similar notions and used different language to describe what is fundamentally the same idea. “Backcasting” is used in urban and environmental planning. Originally developed by University of Toronto professor John B. Robinson to deal with energy problems, backcasting starts by developing a detailed description of a desirable future state; then you work backwards to tease out what needs to happen for that imagined future to become reality.[7] One backcasting exercise that looked at California’s water needs started by imagining an ideal California twenty-five years in the future, then asked what would have to happen—to supply, consumption rates, conservation, and so on—to make that happy outcome real.[8] “Theory of change” is a similar process often used by government agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that seek social change, such as boosting literacy rates, improving sanitation, or better protecting human rights. Again, it starts by defining the goal and only then considers courses of action that could produce that outcome. Silicon Valley is far removed from these worlds, yet the same basic idea is widely used in technology circles. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Steve Jobs told the audience at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference. “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out how you’re going to try to sell it. I made this mistake probably more than anybody in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.”[9] Today, “work backwards” is a mantra in Silicon Valley.