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.
Interpretation
Reading enhances our thinking and cognitive development, leading to intellectual growth.
This quote emphasizes that our reading habits reflect the clarity and depth of our thoughts. Furthermore, it suggests that engaging with diverse texts not only improves our current understanding but also fosters innovative thinking and intellectual evolution in humanity as a whole.
In practice
In a book club discussion about the impact of literature on 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 acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
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.
Early intervention programs enrich adverse family environments. The largest effects of the early intervention programs are on noncognitive traits. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean perseverance, motivation, self-esteem, and hard work.
It's not who you're going to sit beside at school that matters now: it's what resources will your school have.
Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal, but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation.
There are all kinds of monuments to adults - usually dead and usually white. But we don't often lift up the extraordinary work of children.
I think someone should explain to the child that it's OK to make mistakes. That's how we learn. When we compete, we make mistakes.
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.
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