Quotes on Literacy

Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions to which you can go without credentials. You don't even need the sticker on your windshield that you need to get into the public beach. All you need is the willingness to read.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Creating a world that is truly fit for children does not imply simply the absence of war... It means having primary schools nearby that educate children, free of charge... It means building a world fit for children, where every child can grow to adulthood in health, peace and dignity.

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate, it's not simply, 'Do you know what DNA is? Or what the Big Bang is?' That's an aspect of science literacy. The biggest part of it is do you know how to think about information that's presented in front of you.

Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Kids not only need to read a lot but they need lots of books they can read right at their fingertips.They also need access to books that entice them, attract them to reading. Schools...can make it easy and unrisky for children to take books home for the evening or weekend by worrying less about losing books to children and more about losing children to illiteracy.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

Literacy is the most basic currency of the knowledge economy.

The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.

One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children.

When people talk to me about the digital divide, I think of it not so much about who has access to what technology as about who knows how to create and express themselves in the new language of the screen. If students aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.