Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips.
Interpretation
Literacy is a fundamental aspect of human life that often goes unappreciated, representing an ongoing miracle of communication and understanding.
In this quote, Maryanne Wolf highlights the profound impact of literacy on our daily lives, emphasizing that the ability to read and engage with text is not only crucial but also an extraordinary development that continues to evolve. She suggests that we often take for granted the complex processes involved in reading, which connects us to a vast world of knowledge, culture, and communication—a miracle made possible by the written word that is always at our fingertips.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one might quote, 'Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips.'
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 acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
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.
Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.
I perceived how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.
Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
The main difference in the effectiveness of teaching comes from the thoughts the teacher has had during the entire time of his or her existence and brings into the classroom. A teacher concerned with developing humans affects the students quite differently from a teacher who never thinks about such things.
We know that once we stop learning and call ourselves learned, we become useless members of the scientific society.
write what readers want to read, which isn’t necessarily what you want to write.
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