Quotes on Literacy

I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls.

People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment.

Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

It is intolerable that around 1 in 5 of the world's adults are illiterate. How can we build equitable information societies or thriving democracies if so many remain without the basic tools of literacy?

As an empowerment right, education is the primary vehicle by which economically and socially marginalised adults and children can lift themselves out of poverty, and obtain the means to participate fully in their communities.

More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

I think there in a great deal to be said for religious education in the sense of teaching about religion and biblical literacy. Both those things, by the way, I suspect will prepare a child to give up religion. If you are taught comparative religion, you are more likely to realise that there are other religions than the one you have been brought up in. And if you are if you are taught to read the bible, I can think of almost nothing more calculated to turn you off religion.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope... Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition.

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings. This is part of teaching emotional literacy - a set of skills we can all develop, including the ability to read, understand, and respond appropriately to one's own emotions and the emotions of others.

Bush has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamental. In some ways my antiwar stand here is also a stand on anti-literacy. Someone should get G.W. into a reading program, get him to join a book club. Have him read Hamlet, King Lear.

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

In diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

A book is a gift you can open again and again.

We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And it's the brain wiring that I'm more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the lesson plan that's been proposed.

There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.

Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.