Literacy Importance Quotes

Creativity is as important as literacy

Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.

Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.

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.

Science literacy is an important part of what it is to be an informed citizen of society.

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. [from, Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming]

There were lessons later on. These were going a lot better now she’d got rid of the reading books about bouncy balls and dogs called Spot. She’d got Gawain on to the military campaigns of General Tacticus, which were suitably bloodthirsty but, more importantly, considered too difficult for a child. As a result his vocabulary was doubling every week and he could already use words like ‘disembowelled’ in everyday conversation. After all, what was the point of teaching children to be children? They were naturally good at it.

We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.

Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions. It is the sum total of a multiplicity of factors. The weightage of some of these varies from region to region, society to society, culture to culture. But at the core is a fairly compact number of factors. They include not just income and calorie intake. Land, health, education, literacy, infant mortality rates and life expectancy are also some of them. Debt, assets, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation and jobs count too. You can have the mandatory 2,400 or 2,100 calories a day and yet be very poor. India’s problems differ from those of a Somalia or Ethiopia in crisis. Hunger—again just one aspect of poverty—is far more complex here. It is more low level, less visible and does not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia do. That makes covering the process more challenging—and more important. Many who do not starve receive very inadequate nutrition. Children getting less food than they need can look quite normal. Yet poor nutrition can impair both mental and physical growth and they can suffer its debilitating impact all their lives. A person lacking minimal access to health at critical moments can face destruction almost as surely as one in hunger.

What is needed, now, is a new view, to reassess and reform the concept of God. It is the experience of going beyond the norm to achieve insight as to how life events are connected on a “higher” level. We now have an idea of how the process happens in the brain and, importantly, how to develop this innate potential in today’s world. This knowledge could be the first small step toward finding the common ground for us to stand on to work toward a new spiritual literacy.

Though literacy was of course far rarer then than now, reading was in one way a more important ingredient of the total culture.

I will believe in students' competence and intelligence. I will keep faith...that they have stories to tell, things to explain, and the language with which to do those things. I will reject any notion that places in my mind a belief in students' deficits -- whether those deficits be genetic, cultural, or behavioral. I will treat them as people who can get important things done for important reasons.

What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?

As I mentioned in the introduction, we asked around seventy-five hundred people to identify all of the emotions that they could recognize and name when they’re experiencing them. The average was three: glad, sad, and mad—or, as they were more often written, happy, sad, and pissed off. Couple this extremely limited vocabulary with the importance of emotional literacy, and you basically have a crisis. It’s this crisis that I’m trying to help address in this book.

The truth is that a more reasoned approach to politics does not come easily, but nor is it impossible. Like literacy, it requires hard work and the right cultural circumstances. And there is reason not to despair completely: the scientific study of our political psychology and biases is still quite young, and its key findings are still to be widely disseminated. We have yet to turn this crucial self-knowledge into common knowledge, and to make it part of our culture. In particular, we have yet to see it change the perhaps most important aspect of our culture, namely our social incentives.

The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse.

cademics and intellectuals are culture vultures. In a gathering of today’s elite, it is perfectly acceptable to laugh that you barely passed Physics for Poets and Rocks for Jocks and have remained ignorant of science ever since, despite the obvious importance of scientific literacy to informed choices about personal health and public policy. But saying that you have never heard of James Joyce or that you tried listening to Mozart once but prefer Andrew Lloyd Webber is as shocking as blowing your nose on your sleeve or announcing that you employ children in your sweatshop, despite the obvious unimportance of your tastes in leisure-time activity to just about anything.

If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.

Do preschoolers need all the trappings of elementary school . . . ? The faux academic overstimulation? The enforced choices? The cult-like obsession with readiness? I would say, mostly, they do not. And I think some of these trappings, such as the notorious print-rich environments we encountered with their busy totems to industriousness, can actually interfere with the task of becoming a good communicator and a literate person. We spend a lot of energy on creating print-rich environments but that’s not at all the same thing as creating a language-rich environment. Consider again the hope that Finland offers; its guidelines for preprimary (preschool) education remind us that: “The basis for emerging literacy is that children have heard and listened, they have been heard, they have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed things with them, and they have asked questions and received answers.” For our young children, what else is there to wish for?

The powerful effect of female literacy contrasts with the comparatively ineffective roles of, say, male literacy or general poverty reduction as instruments of child mortality reduction. The increase in male literacy over the same range (from 22 to 75 percent) only reduces under-five mortality from 169 per thousand to 141 per thousand. And a 50 percent reduction in the incidence of poverty (from the actual 1981 level) only reduces the predicted value of under-five mortality from 156 per thousand to 153 per thousand. Here again, the message seems to be that some variables relating to women's agency (in this case, female literacy) often play a much more important role in promoting social well-being (in particular, child survival) than variables relating to the general level of opulence in the society. These findings have important practical implications. Both types of variables can be influenced through public action, but respectively require rather different forms of public intervention.

The major impairments of ADD — the distractibility, the hyperactivity and the poor impulse control — reflect, each in its particular way, a lack of self-regulation. Self-regulation implies that someone can direct attention where she chooses, can control impulses and can be consciously mindful and in charge of what her body is doing. Like time literacy, self-regulation is also a distinct task of development in human life, achieved gradually from young childhood through adolescence and adulthood. We are born with no capacity whatsoever to self-regulate emotion or action. For self-regulation to be possible, specific brain centers have to develop and grow connections with other important nerve centers, and chemical pathways need to be established. Attention deficit disorder is a prime illustration of how the adult continues to struggle with the unsolved problems of childhood. She is held back precisely where the child did not develop, hampered in those areas where the infant or toddler got stuck during the course of development.

A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand people who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensable, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital to technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling.

The really strange thing about this is that it was one of the Fog Facts. That is, it was not a secret. It was known. But it was not known. That is, if you asked a knowledgeable journalist, or political analyst, or a historian, they knew about it. If you yourself went and checked the record, you could find it out. But if you asked the man in the street if President Scott, who loved to have his picture taken among the troops and driving armored vehicles and aboard naval vessels, if you asked if Scott had found a way to evade service in Vietnam, they wouldn't have a clue, and, unless they were anti-Scott already, they wouldn't believe it. In the information age there is so much information that sorting and focus and giving the appropriate weight to anything have become incredibly difficult. Then some fact, or event, or factoid mysteriously captures the world's attention and there's a media frenzy. Like Clinton and Lewinsky. Like O. J. Simpson. And everybody in the world knows everything about it. On the flip side are the Fog Facts, important things that nobody seems able to focus on any more than the can focus on a single droplet in the mist. They are known, but not known.

Harari clearly has no knowledge at all of cross-cultural developmental psychology, and of how modes of thought develop in relation to the natural and socio-cultural environments. The people who carved the Stadel lion-man around 30,000 years ago and the Piraha had the same ability to learn as we do, which is why Piraha children can learn to count, but these cognitive skills have to be learnt: we are not born with them all ready to go. Cross-cultural developmental psychology has shown that the development of the cognitive skills of modern humans actually requires literacy and schooling, large-scale bureaucratic societies and complex urban life, the experience of cultural differences, and familiarity with modern technology, to name some of the more important requirements

Our education system is like a money plant, which looks beautiful with big green leaves, but fails to produce any fruit or a flower. Undoubtedly, we are a home to the best doctors, scientists, poets, artists, and whatnot. But I feel, we miserably fail to evoke humanism, compassion, and tolerance in students. If we would count all the do’s and don’ts taught to us in our school, surely don’ts would exceed the number of the do's. I was forced to mug up certain things I was not interested in. Now, I understand the importance of questioning. I wish if our schools could teach us the art of questioning instead of just hunting for answers. Various facts are stuffed in delicate minds, but what about teachings on life, tutoring to never give up, and asking for students’ opinions on a subject? Yes, teaching these things would not directly increase the ‘GDP’ by creating human-machines, but would definitely create better minds and wonderful souls. I really wish our syllabus could preach to us the sheer value of knowledge, wisdom, and awareness. I wish our schools could nurture educated intellectuals, rather than literate persons. I wish we could pay more heed to the education ratio instead of just literacy ratio. We need more thinkers and fewer money makers. We are directed towards a goal already chosen for us, but not asked about our big fantasies and little dreams.

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.

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. It’s the same in all low art that has as goal continued attention and patronage: it’s appealing precisely because it’s at once fun and easy. And the entrenchment of a culture built on Appeal helps explain a dark and curious thing: at a time when there are more decent and good and very good serious fiction writers at work in America than ever before, an American public enjoying unprecedented literacy and disposable income spends the vast bulk of its reading time and book dollar on fiction that is, by any fair standard, trash. Trash fiction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinister phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by — has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock-full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that understands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure. Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But television aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all narrative art. This would be a disaster. [...] Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to bear personal ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute “gives,” but — demanding nothing of comparable value in return — perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader — titillates, repulses, excites, transports him — without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity." - from "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

Shockingly, too many of our children don't read to grade level. Studies show that if a child does not read to grade level by third grade, that child is likely to drop out of school. I believe the love of reading begins at home. We should do all we can to make sure that our children and grandchildren stay in school and graduate. Reading to grade level is an important foundation.

Whether it is called a public forum or a public sphere or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America’s earliest decades. Our first self-expression as a nation—“We the People”—made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important that the marketplace of ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government. The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were the following: It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all. The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent meritocracy of ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them. The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a “conversation of democracy” is all about.

Federal intervention to change the institutions in the South started with the decision of the Supreme Court in 1944 that primary elections where only white people could stand were unconstitutional. As we have seen, blacks had been politically disenfranchised in the 1890s with the use of poll taxes and literacy tests (pages 351–357). These tests were routinely manipulated to discriminate against black people, while still allowing poor and illiterate whites to vote. In a famous example from the early 1960s, in Louisiana a white applicant was judged literate after giving the answer “FRDUM FOOF SPETGH” to a question about the state constitution. The Supreme Court decision in 1944 was the opening salvo in the longer battle to open up the political system to blacks, and the Court understood the importance of loosening white control of political parties.

According to studies that measure the likelihood of a child growing up to be a reader, the most important factor is not how well reading was taught in the child’s school, nor the number of hours spent reading aloud to the child. Regardless of the parents’ income level or education, the statistic most highly correlated to literacy is the number of books present in the home.

Mass production of books ended the Church’s monopoly on Scripture, as well as on other forms of information. The wider availability of books reduced the cost of literacy and thus multiplied the number of thinkers who were in a position to offer their own opinions on important subjects, particularly theological subjects

to note that our educational systems actually teach us to confuse our intellects and our direct-sensing operative abilities as to their priority. Both are important, of course. But we tend to place our intellectual processes above our direct-sensory capabilities, so much so in some instances that many people have lost real touch with their direct-sensory operative functions. The result of

Now, altogether this was an incredible Event. Normally, the theories of mere coincidences or chance happenings are used to explain away something like this. But how, or more importantly, why should so many “chance happenings” group themselves together to produce such a meaningful result? Admittedly, a seemingly unimportant

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

When the Roman Empire declined, Britain went backward. As the Roman villas crumbled, the people built one-room wooden dwellings without chimneys. The technology of Roman pottery—important for storing food—was mostly lost. Literacy declined. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages, and progress was painfully slow for five hundred years. Then, at last, things started to change

Perhaps it does come back to valuing community, after all. Recent studies in science communication have suggested what I've sketched out in this chapter: that scientific literacy is not the variable that determines whether or not a group will accept the reality of a public health issue like vaccination or global warning: social groups are. While those individuals tested demonstrated a surprising ability to factually interpret scientific findings, they tended to eventually revert to in-group thinking about the issue, siding with whatever their main social group already believed. We humans are social, after all. Our social nature is why solitary confinement is potentially a human rights violation, why just about all of us wish we weren't having to stay home during the COVID crisis, why we all cling to Zoom meetings-why children yell at one another across balconies, starved for the sound of another child's voice. We all do the same dance of retreating to our social safety spaces. And if our 'safe' social group told us that our experience during the pandemic was a lie? Well, it seems we'd be more likely to believe our friends than science, because, as I've argued elsewhere...in times of desperate calamity, all we humans really have is one another. I have no answer to this twisted dilemma that the healthy carrier narrative, via the vehicle of COVID-19, has presented to us in the United States, but understanding the dilemma rightly is surely important.

In a world that was even more chauvinistic than our own, the Torah mandates that the Israelite people love peaceful non-Israelites living among them no less than they love themselves. The German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen rightly identifies this law as the beginning of what is known as 'ethical monotheism': 'The stranger was to be protected, although he was not a member of one's family, clan, religion, community or people, simply because he was a human being. In the stranger, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity.

The working Planetologist has access to many resources, data, and projections. However, his most important tools are human beings. Only by cultivating ecological literacy among the people themselves can he save an entire planet.

The working Planetologist has access to many resources, data, and projections. However, his most important tools are human beings. Only by cultivating ecological literacy among the people themselves can he save an entire planet. Pardot Kynes, The Case for Bela Tegeuse

The second law has a reputation for being recondite, notoriously difficult, and a litmus test of scientific literacy. Indeed, the novelist and former chemist C. P. Snow is famous for having asserted in his The Two Cultures that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is equivalent to never having read a work by Shakespeare. I actually have serious doubts about whether Snow understood the law himself, but I concur with his sentiments. The second law is of central importance in the whole of science, and hence in our rational understanding of the universe, because it provides a foundation for understanding why any change occurs. Thus, not only is it a basis for understanding why engines run and chemical reactions occur, but it is also a foundation for understanding those most exquisite consequences of chemical reactions, the acts of literary, artistic, and musical creativity that enhance our culture.

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.

REMEMBER THIS •​Don’t underestimate your child’s ability to precommit and follow through. Even young children can learn to use precommitments as long as they set the rules and know how to use a timer or some other binding system. •​Consumer skepticism is healthy. Understanding that companies are motivated to keep kids spending time watching or playing is an important part of teaching media literacy. •​Put the kids in charge. It’s only when kids practice monitoring their own behavior that they learn how to manage their own time and attention.

Financial literacy lessons should be introduced at an early stage of schooling. Basic concepts like budgeting, saving, and the importance of credit should be integrated into the curriculum. This approach ensures that young minds absorb essential financial knowledge at the right time.

Among the many blessings of belonging to a faith which has such an important place for written scriptures, is the blessing of literacy and literary culture. It is a simple fact that the desire to read and share the Bible, translated into our own language, has been the main driver for literacy and everything that pertains to it: from the production of paper and the invention of printing, to children in learning their letters in elementary schools. The Word within the Words

A scientifically illiterate public is a headache; a serious shortfall in the numbers and competence of scientists would be an enormous disaster. Indeed, a prime reason for taking the scientific literacy problem seriously is that it threatens, in some ways, to limit the capability of the scientific community to sustain and renew itself. Though it is emphatically unfashionable to say so these clays (especially within the pedagogical establishment), the nurturance of new generations of scientists is the most important duty of science education, and has first call on our attention and concern.

The relationship between an artist’s biography and his writing is always a difficult subject,” concedes Worden, “but there can be no other important writer since the invention of printing for whom we are unable to demonstrate any relationship at all.” Why didn’t Shakespeare bother to educate his children? His daughters couldn’t write. One signed with what Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, paleographer and director of the British Museum, called a “painfully formed signature, which was probably the most that she was capable of doing with the pen.” The other, he concluded, “could not write at all, for she signed with a mark.” How could a writer—any writer, let alone the greatest writer in the English language—be indifferent to the literacy of his children?

By instilling a sense of delayed gratification in their children, parents can teach them the importance of patience and long-term financial planning, preparing them for a prosperous future.

life,” was written in cuneiform with the pictorial sign for “arrow,” which in Sumerian is also called ti.7 An important step has been taken here. With the rebus, a pictorial sign is used to directly invoke a particular sound of the human voice, rather than the outward reference of that sound. The rebus, with its focus upon the sound of a name rather than the thing named, inaugurated the distant possibility of a phonetic script (from the Greek phonein: “to sound”), one that would directly transcribe the sound of the speaking voice rather than its outward intent or meaning.8 However, many factors impeded the generalization of the rebus principle, and thus prevented the development of a fully phonetic writing system. For example, a largely pictographic script can easily be utilized, for communicative purposes, by persons who speak very different dialects (and hence cannot understand one another’s speech). The same image or ideogram, readily understood, would simply invoke a different sound in each dialect. Thus a pictographic script allows for commerce between neighboring and even distant linguistic communities—an advance that would be lost if rebuslike signs alone were employed to transcribe the spoken sounds of one community. (This factor helps explain why China, a vast society comprised of a multitude of distinct dialects, has never developed a fully phonetic script.)9 Another factor inhibiting the development of a fully phonetic script was the often elite status of the scribes. Ideographic scripts must make use of a vast number of stylized glyphs or characters, since every term in the language must, at least in principle, have its own written character. (In 1716 a dictionary of Chinese—admittedly an extreme example—listed 40,545 written characters! Today a mere 8,000 characters are in use.)10 Complete knowledge of the pictographic system, therefore, could only be the province of a few highly trained individuals. Literacy, within such cultures, was in

fact the literacy of a caste, or cult, whose sacred knowledge was often held in great esteem by the rest of society. It is unlikely that the scribes would willingly develop innovations that could simplify the new technology and so render literacy more accessible to the rest of the society, for this would surely lessen their own importance and status. …it is clear that ancient writing was in the hands of a small literate elite, the scribes, who manifested great conservatism in the practice of their craft, and, so far from being interested in its simplification, often chose to demonstrate their virtuosity by a proliferation of signs and values….11 Nevertheless, in the ancient Middle East the rebus principle was eventually generalized—probably by scribes working at a distance from the affluent and established centers of civilization—to cover all the common sounds of a given language. Thus, “syllabaries” appeared, wherein every basic sound-syllable of the language had its own conventional notation or written character (often rebuslike in origin). Such writing systems employed far fewer signs than the pictographic scripts from which they were derived, although the number of signs was still very much larger than the alphabetic script we now take for granted. The innovation which gave rise to the alphabet was itself developed by Semitic scribes around 1500 B.C.E.12 It consisted in recognizing that almost every syllable of their language was composed of one or more silent consonantal elements plus an element of sounded breath—that which we would today call a vowel. The silent consonants provided, as it were, the bodily framework or shape through which the sounded breath must flow. The original Semitic aleph-beth, then, established a character, or letter, for each of the consonants of the language. The vowels, the sounded breath that must be added to the written consonants in order to make them

The most important feature of the law eliminated literacy tests and other disenfranchising devices in states where less than 50 percent of eligible voters had registered or cast ballots in the 1964 presidential election, which covered Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and thirty-four counties in North Carolina, along with Alaska; Apache County, Arizona; Elmore County, Idaho; and Aroostook County, Maine. This formula, though imperfect, captured the key southern states where the bulk of black voters were disenfranchised. “We

Page 52-53: Classical Jewish society has no peasants, and in this it differs profoundly from earlier Jewish societies in the two centers, Palestine and Mesopotamia. It is difficult for us, in modern times, to understand what this means. We have to make an effort to imagine what serfdom was like; the enormous difference in literacy, let alone education, between village and town throughout this period; the incomparably greater freedom enjoyed by all the small minority who were not peasants – in order to realize that during the whole of the classical period [800-1790 AD.] the Jews, in spite of all the persecutions to which they were subjected, formed an integral part of the privileged classes. Jewish historiography, especially in English, is misleading on this point inasmuch as it tends to focus on Jewish poverty and anti-Jewish discrimination. Both were real enough at times; but the poorest Jewish craftsman, peddler, landlord’s steward or petty cleric was immeasurably better off than a serf. … [It is significant that] prior to the beginning of the great Jewish migration of modern times (around 1880), a large majority of all Jews were living in [areas [where serfdom persisted] and that their most important social function there was to mediate the oppression of the peasants on behalf of the nobility and the Crown. Everywhere, classical Judaism developed hatred and contempt for agriculture as an occupation and for peasants as a class, even more than for other Gentiles – a hatred of which I know no parallel in other societies.

In today's digital world, digital literacy is as important as traditional literacy.

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.

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.

Since seminary tends to academize the faith, making it a world of ideas to be mastered (I will write about this at length later in this book), it is quite easy for students to buy into the belief that biblical maturity is about the precision of theological knowledge and the completeness of their biblical literacy. So seminary graduates, who are Bible and theology experts, tend to think of themselves as being mature. But it must be said that maturity is not merely something you do with your mind (although that is an important element of spiritual maturity). No, maturity is about how you live your life. It is possible to be theologically astute and be very immature. It is possible to be biblically literate and be in need of significant spiritual growth.

Most important, a boy needs male modeling of a rich emotional life. He needs to learn emotional literacy as much from his father and other men as from his mother and other women, because he must create a life and language for himself that speak with male identity. A boy must see and believe that emotions belong in the life of a man.

What do we want most for our children? What's most important in the grand scheme of things? We want them to grow up and be happy.

It is important to note that going through the motions of answering questions is not critical literacy; rather, critical literacy involves the reader’s understanding of the author’s intent, bias, and purpose for writing.

The American experiment was based on the emergence in the second half of the eighteenth century of a fresh new possibility in human affairs: that the rule of reason could be sovereign. You could say that the age of print begat the Age of Reason which begat the age of democracy. The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege. The democratic logic inherent in these new trends was blunted and forestalled by the legacy structures of power in Europe. But the intrepid migrants who ventured across the Atlantic -- many of them motivated by a desire to escape the constraints of class and creed -- carried the potent seeds of the Enlightenment and planted them in the fertile soil of the New World. Our Founders understood this better than any others; they realized that a "well-informed citizenry" could govern itself and secure liberty for individuals by substituting reason for brute force. They decisively rejected the three-thousand-year-old superstitious belief in the divine right of kings to rule absolutely and arbitrarily. They reawakened the ancient Greek and Roman traditions of debating the wisest courses of action by exchanging information and opinions in new ways. Whether it is called a public forum or a public sphere or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America's earliest decades. Our first self-expression as a nation -- "We the People" -- made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important the marketplace for ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government. The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were the following: 1. It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all. 2. The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent meritocracy of ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them. 3. The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "conversation of democracy" is all about.

many reasons to learn how to program: To understand our world. To study and understand processes. To be able to ask questions about the influences on their lives. To use an important new form of literacy. To have a new way to learn art, music, science, and mathematics. As a job skill. To use computers better. As a medium in which to learn problem-solving.

Abraham’s readiness to obey God’s command shows him to be ethically deficient by later standards, but not by those of his age. True, God had revealed Himself to Abraham, but He had not made known to him the full ethical implications of monotheism. Since other contemporary religious believers sacrificed sons to their gods, God, in essence, was asking Abraham if he was as devoted to his God as the pagan idolaters were to theirs.

Deborah agrees to accompany Barak, but can’t resist a jab at the sexism of the Israelite society: “Very well, I will go with you. However, there will be no glory for you in the course you are taking, for then the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman

An important aspect of the party’s claim to cultural vanguard status was its possession of esoteric knowledge, namely Marxist-Leninist ideology. Knowledge of the basics of historical and dialectical materialism was a prerequisite for all Communists. What this meant in practice was a grasp of Marx’s theory of historical development, which showed that the driving power of history was class struggle; that capitalism throughout the world must ultimately succumb to proletarian revolution, as it had done in Russia in 1917; and that in the course of time the revolutionary proletarian dictatorship would lead the society to socialism. To outsiders, the boiled-down Marxism of Soviet political literacy courses might look simplistic, almost catechismic. To insiders, it was a “scientific” worldview that enabled its possessors to rid themselves and others of all kinds of prejudice and superstition—and incidentally master an aggressive debating style characterized by generous use of sarcasm about the motives and putative “class essence” of opponents. Smugness and tautology, along with polemical vigor, were among the most notable characteristics of Soviet Marxism.

The basis for emerging literacy is that children have heard and listened, they have been heard, they have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed things with them, and they have asked questions and received answers.31 For our young children, what else is there to wish for?