In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
Interpretation
Reading combines analytical and creative thinking.
Maryanne Wolf's quote highlights the dual nature of reading, where one engages both the scientific aspect of critical analysis and the poetic aspect of imagination and emotional expression. It suggests that through reading, we not only acquire knowledge and understanding like scientists, but we also explore feelings and creativity as poets.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literacy, one can use this quote to emphasize the value of reading.
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.
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.
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.
Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.
Concentration is a part of life. It is not the consequence of a method of education.
Kids ask me questions. You'd think after doing this for four years, I would have heard every single question anyone could think of to ask, but no, every time, they surprise me, they ask me something I never thought of before.
The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.
School typically doesn't prepare young people for real life - unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that's why so many students who succeed in school fail in life.
The school-to-prison pipeline - the disproportionality that exists in handing out school discipline in schools to Black and Brown students for simple infractions - pushes kids out of classrooms and into our ever-growing system of mass incarceration.
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