Literacy Matters Quotes

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The glorification of hatred is predicated on a foundation of fear-induced ignorance venomous to haters and those they believe they hate.
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Everyone was literate as a matter of course. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that. It was there to read, and we read.
Katherine Anne Porter
There is nothing sane, merciful, heroic, devout, redemptive, wise, holy, loving, peaceful, joyous, righteous, gracious, remotely spiritual, or worthy of praise where mass murder is concerned. We have been in this world long enough to know that by now and to understand that nonviolent conflict resolution informed by mutual compassion is the far better option.
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
If you are in a position where you can reach people, then use your platform to stand up for a cause. HINT: social media is a platform.
Germany Kent
Bible literacy matters because it protects us from falling into error. Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their messages to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our Bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview. Disillusionment and apathy eat away at our ranks. Women, in particular, are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers.1
Jen Wilkin (Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds)
Education is at the heart of the matter. Literacy is not enough. It is good to have a population which is able to read; but infinitely better to have people able to distinguish what is worth reading.
Nani Palkhivala (100 Witty Quotes by Nani Palkhivala (Rupa Quick Reads))
Think before you click. If people do not know you personally and if they cannot see you as you type, what you post online can be taken out of context if you are not careful in the way your message is delivered.
Germany Kent
Denying that race matters is irrational in the face of segregation and all of the other forms of obvious racial inequity in society. It is even more irrational to believe that it is whites who are at the receiving end of discrimination. Maintaining this denial of reality takes tremendous emotional and psychic energy.
Robin DiAngelo (What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy (Counterpoints))
America’s Founders understood literacy as a prerequisite for freedom and our form of self-government. Once we know how to read, what we read matters. So let’s build some reading lists of books you plan to wrestle with and be shaped by for the rest of your lifetime. Then,
Ben Sasse (The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance)
An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.
James Paul Gee (What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy)
As a practical matter I’ve learned to seek the minimum amount of technology for myself that will create the maximum amount of choices for myself and others. The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster called this approach the Ethical Imperative, and he put it this way: “Always act to increase the number of choices.” The way we can use technologies to increase choices for others is by encouraging science, innovation, education, literacies, and pluralism. In my own experience this principle has never failed: In any game, increase your options.      
Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants)
The best trust you can ever give to your children is financial literacy
Mac Duke The Strategist
For centuries, no one was concerned that books weren’t girl-friendly, because no one really cared if girls read; but even so, we persisted for long enough that literature has slowly come to accommodate us. Modern boys, by contrast, are not trying to read in a culture of opposition. Nobody is telling them reading doesn’t matter, that boys don’t need to read and that actually, no prospective wife looks for literacy in a husband. Quite the opposite! Male literary culture thrives, both teachers and parents are throwing books at their sons, and the fact that the books aren’t sticking isn’t, as the nature of the complaint makes clear, because boys don’t like reading – no. The accusation is that boys don’t like reading about girls, which is a totally different matter. Because constantly, consistently, our supposedly equal society penalises boys who express an interest in anything feminine. The only time boys are discouraged from books all together is in contexts where, for whatever reason, they’ve been given the message that reading itself is girly – which is a wider extrapolation of the same problem.
Foz Meadows
If plain run is good enough for I, you, we, they, why isn't it good enough for he, she, it? Because we have no choice in the matter. The decision was made by those who fixed our grammar at a certain stage of its evolution, and their decision will probably stand forever.
E.D. Hirsch Jr. (Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know)
Let us suppose that such a person began by observing those Christian activities which are, in a sense, directed towards this present world. He would find that this religion had, as a mere matter of historical fact, been the agent which preserved such secular civilization as survived the fall of the Roman Empire; that to it Europe owes the salvation, in those perilous ages, of civilized agriculture, architecture, laws, and literacy itself. He would find that this same religion has always been healing the sick and caring for the poor; that it has, more than any other, blessed marriage; and that arts and philosophy tend to flourish in its neighborhood. In a word, it is always either doing, or at least repenting with shame for not having done, all the things which secular humanitarianism enjoins. If our enquirer stopped at this point he would have no difficulty in classifying Christianity—giving it its place on a map of the ‘great religions.
C.S. Lewis (God in the Dock)
Surveys show that a large proportion of veiled women hold progressive views on such matters as gender. For some women, who have come from rural areas to the university and are the first members of their family to advance beyond basic literacy, the assumption of Islamic dress provides continuity and makes their rite of passage to modernity less traumatic than it might otherwise have been.
Karen Armstrong (Islam: A Short History)
Access to useful information also was determined by literacy and the availability of reading material. It is now widely agreed at least for Britain that increases in literacy were relatively modest during the Industrial Revolution. Yet literacy is not particularly useful unless people actually read, and for the purposes of technological change it also matters how much and what people read.
Joel Mokyr (The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy)
PowerPoint presentations, the cesspool of data visualization that Microsoft has visited upon the earth. PowerPoint, indeed, is a cautionary tale in our emerging data literacy. It shows that tools matter: Good ones help us think well and bad ones do the opposite. Ever since it was first released in 1990, PowerPoint has become an omnipresent tool for showing charts and info during corporate presentations.
Clive Thompson (Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better)
As a practical matter I’ve learned to seek the minimum amount of technology for myself that will create the maximum amount of choices for myself and others. The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster called this approach the Ethical Imperative, and he put it this way: “Always act to increase the number of choices.” The way we can use technologies to increase choices for others is by encouraging science, innovation, education, literacies, and pluralism. In my own experience this principle has never failed: In any game, increase your options.
Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants)
It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don’t matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.42
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
«То, что все мы сейчас ощущаем – это постоянное давление, заставляющее нас владеть достаточной информацией, всегда, иначе нас назовут культурно безграмотными. Чтобы мы могли выдержать мини-презентацию, деловое совещание, посещение офисной кухни, коктейльную вечеринку. Чтобы мы могли оставлять посты, твиты, чаты, комментарии, тексты, доказывая тем самым, что мы вроде как видели, читали, смотрели, слушали. То, что значимо для нас, утопает в петабайтах информации. И нам вовсе необязательно потреблять этот контент из первых рук. Достаточно лишь знать, что он существует – выразить свое мнение по этому вопросу и суметь поучаствовать в беседе на эту тему. Мы подходим опасно близко к созданию поддельной осведомленности, которая в действительности является новой моделью невежества». Karl Taro Greenfield, “Faking Cultural Literacy,” New York Times онлайн, 24 мая 2014.
Tom Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters)
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.
Pinker Steven (Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters)
In “Internet of Stings,” Jennifer Howard began one of the more disconcerting essays about some of these issues that came up in interviews with one of the purveyors of false news: As one master of the fake-news genre told the Washington Post55: “Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore.” Separating truth from fiction takes time, information literacy, and an open mind, all of which seem in short supply in a distracted, polarized culture. We love to share instantly—and that makes us easy to manipulate. There are many tough issues here for students, teachers, parents, and the members of our republic. How our citizens think, decide, and vote depends on their collective ability to navigate the complex realities of a digital milieu with intellects not just capable of, but accustomed to higher-level understanding and analysis. It is no longer only a matter of which medium is better for what; it is a question of how the optimal mode of thought in our children and our young adults and ourselves can be fostered in this moment of history. These are hardly new thoughts either for
Maryanne Wolf (Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World)
It comes down to what is language? Up to now, until this age of mass literacy, language has been something spoken. In utterance there’s a minimum of slowness. In trying to treat words as chisel strokes, you run the risk of losing the quality of utterance, the rhythm of utterance, the happiness. A phrase out of Mark Twain—he describes a raft hitting a bridge and says that it “went all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches struck by lightning.” The beauty of “scatteration” could only have occurred to a talkative man, a man who had been brought up among people who were talking and who loved to talk himself. I’m aware myself of a certain dryness of this reservoir, this backlog of spoken talk. A Romanian once said to me that Americans are always telling stories. I’m not sure this is as true as it once was. Where we once used to spin yarns, now we sit in front of the tv and receive pictures. I’m not sure the younger generation even knows how to gossip. But, as for a writer, if he has something to tell, he should perhaps type it almost as fast as he could talk it. We must look to the organic world, not the inorganic world, for metaphors; and just as the organic world has periods of repose and periods of great speed and exercise, so I think the writer’s process should be organically varied. But there’s a kind of tautness that you should feel within yourself no matter how slow or fast you’re spinning out the reel.
John Updike
So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them. Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.10 They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech.11 They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations.12 They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.13 For all these reasons, the growth of education—and its first dividend, literacy—is a flagship of human progress.
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
Among Evangelical Christians, all of whom await the Second Coming of Jesus, there are historically two camps: postmillennialists and premillennialists. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most were of the "post" variety, meaning that they expected the Messiah's return after the thousand-year reign of peace. In order to hasten His arrival, they set out to create that harmonious world here and now, fighting for the abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, public education, and women's literacy. The chaos of the Civil War and industrialization caused many evangelicals to rethink their optimism. They determined that Jesus would actually arrive before the final judgment. Therefore any efforts toward a just society here on earth were futile; what mattered was perfecting one's faith. As historian Randall Balmer writes, these believers "retreated into a theology of despair, one that essentially ceded the temporal world to Satan and his minions.
Mark Sundeen (The Man Who Quit Money)
Perhaps illiterate people have particularly good memories to compensate for being unable to write things down, just as the blind are popularly believed to have especially keen ears or sensitive fingers. Such arguments must be rejected…. And while it would be logically possible to argue that literacy and schooling make memory worse, the fact of the matter is that they don’t. On the contrary: cross-cultural studies have generally found a positive relation between schooling and memory…. Skilled performances by oral poets are found only in nonliterate societies because the concept of poetry itself changes when literacy appears…. Literal, verbatim memory does exist, nevertheless. It makes its appearance whenever a performance is defined by fidelity to a particular text. Ulric Neisser, Memory Observed, pp. 241–242
John Dominic Crossan (The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set: Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Birth of Christianity, The Power of Parable, and The Greatest Prayer)
Every mistake is a chance to reflect, analyze, and revise. Every mistake—and every success—makes me a better teacher. But I also know that I couldn’t have made it without a collective of students, teachers, parents, and community members, like Mrs. Leona Wallace, who encouraged me, nurtured me, challenged me, and taught me. And who pushed me to understand that no matter where we teach or who we teach, we are always teaching about race and class.
Antero García (Pose, Wobble, Flow: A Culturally Proactive Approach to Literacy Instruction (Language and Literacy Series))
Yet we can look at other people and, more or less, see the inadequacy of our ideological individuality. We often point out that someone “was born a bad seed and was going to turn out rotten no matter what,” or someone “was destined to triumph and succeed.” In fact, “it’s in the stars” is still used, even though in modern intellectual circles the concepts of Fate and Destiny are
Ingo Swann (Psychic Literacy: & the Coming Psychic Renaissance)
Secondary school literacy skills are more complex and more embedded in subject matters than in primary schools (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004).
Margarita Espino Calderon (Teaching Reading to English Learners, Grades 6 - 12: A Framework for Improving Achievement in the Content Areas)
Our own lives are filled with experiences and beliefs that are peculiar to our culture, and would seem bizarre to anyone outside it. We do not need to look far for examples. The ability to read is a good illustration. For the great majority of western people, the habit of literacy makes it impossible to scan the shelves of a newsagent's shop without noticing the titles of magazines. When we walk down the high street, we recognise the words on posters and shop-window displays without even trying to do so. These actions are automatic; they feel as natural as breathing. But reading is an acquired skill that can only be mastered through years of practice. Moreover, mass literacy is a comparatively recent phenomenon: only a fraction of the European population could read in the fifteenth century.
Darren Oldridge (Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds)
This is why the collapse of the relationship between experts and citizens is a dysfunction of democracy itself. The abysmal literacy, both political and general, of the American public is the foundation for all of these problems. It is the soil in which all of the other dysfunctions have taken root and prospered, with the 2016 election only its most recent expression.
Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters)
The literacy rate among poor whites is extremely low.  Without education, it doesn’t matter what race you are.
Ginny Dye (Journey To Joy (The Bregdan Chronicles #17))
For Freire, political literacy clearly matters, not just actual illiteracy. Indeed, as we will see, actual literacy is, at best, a secondary concern. He feels this way because, in keeping with Karl Marx, whose theology he adopted in full, man’s true nature lies in gaining the power to transform the world (into a socialist utopia through relentless critique of what is), and his ability to participate in this process of political activism and transformation is the most fundamental aspect of his being and his key human right.
James Lindsay (The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire's Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education)
We will never build resilience to cyberattacks—or foreign disinformation campaigns, for that matter—without good policy and nationwide awareness of cyber threats. We should make cybersecurity and media literacy a core part of American curriculum. Too many cyberattacks rely on vulnerable American systems, running on software that is not up-to-date or which has not been patched. This is, in large part, an education problem. The same goes for information warfare. Americans are being coopted by disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories because Americans lack the tools to spot influence operations, foreign and domestic, in real time.
Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race)
When parents openly communicate about money matters, they empower their children to develop a healthy understanding of financial concepts, fostering a positive relationship with money.
Linsey Mills (Teach Your Child About Money Through Play: 110+ Games/Activities, Tips, and Resources to Teach Kids Financial Literacy at an Early Age)
We still face a slew of digital divides, in that some people simply have better access to good computing equipment, fast network access, and digital literacy skills than others. These divides commonly fall along socioeconomic lines:
John Palfrey (BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google)
For us, scientific literacy constitutes the knowledge you need to understand public issues. It is a mix of facts, vocabulary, concepts, history, and philosophy. It is not the specialized stuff of the experts, but the more general, less precise knowledge used in political discourse.
Robert M. Hazen (Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy)
Intense study of a particular field of science does not necessarily make one scientifically literate. Indeed, it has been our experience that working scientists are often illiterate outside their own field of professional expertise.
Robert M. Hazen (Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy)
the education of professional scientists is often just as narrowly focused as the education of any other group of professionals, and scientists are just as likely to be ignorant of scientific matters as anyone else. You should keep this in mind the next time a Nobel laureate speaks ex cathedra on issues outside his or her own field of specialization. Finally,
Robert M. Hazen (Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy)
We live in a world that operates according to a few general laws of nature. Everything you do from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed happens because of the working of one of these laws. This exceedingly beautiful and elegant view of the world is the crowning achievement of centuries of work by scientists. There is intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction to be gained from seeing the unity between a pot of water on a stove and the slow march of the continents, between the colors of the rainbow and the behavior of the fundamental constituents of matter. The scientifically illiterate person has been cut off from an enriching part of life, just as surely as a person who cannot read. Finally,
Robert M. Hazen (Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy)
To function as a citizen, you need to know a little bit about a lot of different sciences—a little biology, a little geology, a little physics, and so on. But universities (and, by extension, primary and secondary schools) are set up to teach one science at a time.
Robert M. Hazen (Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy)
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.
Robert M. Hazen (Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy)
Most funding for American scientific research comes from the federal government (your tax dollars at work).
Robert M. Hazen (Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy)
I would suggest that true literacy—the kind that matters—brings about clearer thinking and informed action. Thus, true biblical literacy involves an interaction with the Bible that changes the way one thinks and acts, and that kind of interaction takes time.
George H. Guthrie (Read the Bible for Life: Your Guide to Understanding and Living God's Word)
Celebrity culture plunges us into a moral void. No one has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or ability to “succeed.” The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame. It does not matter how these are obtained. These values, as Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory. They are hollow. They leave us chasing vapors. They urge us toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. They tell us that existence is to be centered on the practices and desires of the self rather than the common good. The ability to lie and manipulate others, the very ethic of capitalism, is held up as the highest good.
Chris Hedges (Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)
WHEN MY DAUGHTER NICOLE WAS AN INFANT, I READ AN essay suggesting that it might no longer be necessary to teach children how to read or write, because speech recognition and synthesis would soon render those abilities superfluous. My wife and I were horrified by the idea, and we resolved that, no matter how sophisticated technology became, our daughter’s skills would always rest on the bedrock of traditional literacy. It turned out that we and the essayist were both half correct: now that she’s an adult, Nicole can read as well as I can. But there is a sense in which she has lost the ability to write. She doesn’t dictate her messages and ask a virtual secretary to read back to her what she last said, the way that essayist predicted; Nicole subvocalizes, her retinal projector displays the words in her field of vision, and she makes revisions using a combination of gestures and eye movements. For all practical purposes, she can write. But take away the assistive software and give her nothing but a keyboard like the one I remain faithful to, and she’d have difficulty spelling out many of the words in this very sentence.
Ted Chiang (The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling (Exhalation))
Unbeknownst to them or their families, children who grow up in environments with few or no literacy experiences are already playing catch-up when they enter kindergarten and the primary grades. It is not simply a matter of the number of words unheard and unlearned. When words are not heard, concepts are not learned. When syntactic forms are never encountered, there is less knowledge about the relationship of events in a story. When story forms are never known, there is less ability to infer and to predict. When cultural traditions and the feelings of others are never experienced, there is less understanding of what other people feel.
Maryanne Wolf (Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain)
Oddly enough, it is a consumer-oriented culture that is concerned about authors and labels of authenticity. Manuscript culture was producer-ori-ented, almost entirely a do-it-yourself culture, and naturally looked to the relevance and usability of items rather than their sources. Not only was private authorship in the later print meanings unknown, but there was no reading public in our sense, either. This is a matter that has usually been confused with ideas about "the extent of literacy." But even if literacy were universal, under manuscript conditions an author would still have no public. An advanced scientist today has no public. He has a few friends and colleagues with whom he talks about his work. What we need to have in mind is that the manuscript book was slow to read and slow to move or be circulated.
Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenbery Galaxy)