Literacy Quotes - Page 9

• The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.

  Robert Hass

  Ideas, Soul, Able

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

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• South Korea from a country that had relatively little primary education became close to universal literacy in the course of 25, 30 years, in a way trying to replicate what Japan had done earlier. They were learning to some extent from the Japanese experience too. So I think, in a sense, the East Asians were following a path, which all other countries including South Asia could follow but chose not too.

  Amartya Sen

  Country, Thinking, Korea

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

  Amartya Sen

  Children, Mortality, Women's Education

  Amartya Sen (2011). “Development as Freedom”, p.195, Anchor

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• Education spurs growth and unlocks potential. After all, a single year of primary education creates a 10 to 20 percent increase in a woman's wages later in life. Education lowers the risk of disease and decreases the likelihood that a child will fall into violence and crime. And a child born to a literate mother is 50 percent more likely to survive past age five. No country has achieved sustained growth without at least 40 percent literacy for its adults.

  Shakira

  Mother, Country, Children

  Source: www.americasquarterly.org

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• For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

  Chinua Achebe

  Reading, Writing, People

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

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• Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Ignorance, Vaccines, Intellectual

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• They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy--for their patrons and themselves.

  Marilyn Johnson

  Men, Favorite Words, Shoes

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• Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy and add one or two generations to allow the idea to sink in and, democracy, more or less automatically, appears.

  Gwynne Dyer

  Country, Years, Ideas

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• Educators, long disturbed by schoolchildren's lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency: emotional literacy. And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that "we care more about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether they'll be alive next week."

  Daniel Goleman

  Education, Teacher, Reading

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• Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution.

  Jean Berko Gleason

  Acquisition, Evolution, Language

  "Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life". "On Being" with Krista Tippett, onbeing.org. November 3, 2011.

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• When people talk to me about the digital divide, I think of it not so much about who has access to what technology as about who knows how to create and express themselves in the new language of the screen. If students aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?

  George Lucas

  Writing, College, Thinking

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• Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow's problems flow.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Flow, Tomorrow, Problem

  Interview with Jim Clash, uk.askmen.com. August 23, 2012.

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• Enthusiasm is contagious. Start an epidemic.

  Don Ward

  Reading, Optimistic, Epidemics

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• Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.

  Kofi Annan

  Education, Knowledge, Information Is Power

  Kofi Atta Annan (1998). “The quotable Kofi Annan: selections from speeches and statements by the Secretary-General”, United Nations

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• A basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Fall, Magic, Landscape

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• Creativity is the new literacy

  Chase Jarvis

  Creativity

  FaceBook post by Chase Jarvis from Sep 06, 2014

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• Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.

  Henry Jenkins

  Expression, Focus, Community

  "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education of the 21st Century". www.nwp.org. 2006.

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• Learn your language well and command it well, and you will have the first component to life.

  Edward R. Murrow

  Life, Learning, Firsts

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• When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.

  Jean Fritz

  Reading, Book, Library

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• A library should be like a pair of open arms.

  Roger Rosenblatt

  Reading, Library, Pairs

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• What can I say? Librarians rule.

  Regis Philbin

  Reading, Library, Librarian

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• Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy. The most powerful tool that we have to strengthen literacy is often the most underused and overlooked, and that is a child's own stories.

  Pam Allyn

  Children, Powerful, Reading

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• Video games provide an easy lead-in to computer literacy. They can get you thinking like a video game designer and can even lead to designing since many games come with software to modify the game or redesign it.

  James Paul Gee

  Thinking, Playing Games, Computer Literacy

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• Not enough of our society is trained how to understand and interpret quantitative information. This activity is a centerpiece of science literacy to which we should all strive-the future health, wealth, and security of our democracy depend on it. Until that is achieved, we are at risk of making under-informed decisions that affect ourselves, our communities, our country, and even the world.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Country, Future, Science

  "Neil deGrasse Tyson Sounds The Alarm Over Science Illiteracy, And For Good Reason" By David Freeman, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 5, 2015.

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• With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.

  Robin Wall Kimmerer

  Reading, Steps, Findings

  Robin Wall Kimmerer (2003). “Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses”

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