The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
Interpretation
Literacy is a vital achievement that sets humans apart from other species.
In this quote, Maryanne Wolf emphasizes the significance of literacy as a remarkable development in human evolution. It highlights how the ability to read and write is not only a crucial skill for communication but also a unique characteristic that distinguishes Homo sapiens from all other species on Earth, underscoring the intellectual and cultural advancements made possible through literacy.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of education in society.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
There's no question that our children's attention and memory is changing when they are reading too long, too much, too early on digital screens.
We need less memorization - I never memorized the periodic table of the elements - I've never used it, and I'm a physicist! I can look it up.
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.
We know that when people are civically engaged, when they understand what their rights are, when they understand that in a democracy you can challenge governments, you can challenge policymakers, and you can... actually shape and form future policy, I think it changes the perception that a lot of young people have about where power is.
Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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