All readers are tourists. We want to make sense of what we see and hear, to find the balance between what is unknown and what we can call ours.
Interpretation
Reading allows us to explore new ideas and perspectives while integrating them into our understanding of the world.
In this quote, Margo Jefferson highlights the idea that reading is akin to tourism, where readers venture into new realms of thought and experience. Just as tourists seek to understand a new place, readers strive to make sense of diverse narratives and information, ultimately blending these unfamiliar concepts with their own knowledge and experiences to achieve a sense of understanding and belonging.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literature in education.
We talk about how we think, believe, suspect Michael Jackson treats children. We don't talk about how WE treat child stars. Child stars are abused by the culture. And what's more treacherous than when the rewards of child stardom issue from the abuse?_x000D_ Child stars are performers above all else. Whenever their triumps, they are going to make sure we see everyone of their scars. That's the final price of admission.
I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
So much of what blacks and women contend with is centered in how we view, and how the world views, our bodies. Gestures, voices, affect.
Depression is so treacherous - it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it's yours and yours alone - no one else can interfere with it.
I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who'd dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
To achieve our goals of educating bold and ambitious children, we must invest in enriching, quality early child care and learning.
To exterminate our popular vices is a work of far more importance to the character and happiness of our citizens than any other improvements in our system of education.
I think it's very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they're growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.
If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.
Avoid compulsion and let early education be a matter of amusement. Young children learn by games; compulsory education cannot remain in the soul.
The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn't matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned.
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