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Literacy Quotes

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Literacy Quotes

“The US education system works well, just not for lower-SES students, it's said. Ravitch and friends would take credit for successes in the segment of the population where educational quality has less impact and relinquish responsibility for the children for whom educational quality matters most. Rather than focusing narrowly on the undeniably large role of poverty in poor achievement, we might also focus on the undeniably large role that education could play in improving outcomes.”

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Book:Language at the Speed of Sight
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“These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda - to complicate reading and literacy so that we will purchase its programs and materials.”

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Book:Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning
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“Civil War armies were the most literate in history to that time. More than 90 percent of white Union soldiers and more than 80 percent of Confederate soldiers were literate, and most of them wrote frequent letters to families and friends... I am convinced that [their letters and diaries] bring us closer to the real thoughts and emotions of those men than any other kind of surviving evidence.”

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Book:For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
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“The whole-language trend assumes that reading is a natural, genetically programmed part of language development, and that children will pick it up as easily as speaking. However, as noted, since writing has only existed for 5,ooo years and literacy has only been widespread for a few centuries, it is highly unlikely that the human brain has evolved structures specifically for reading and writing in this time. It is our ability to learn through experience that allows us to achieve reading, but only with explicit instruction.”

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Book:A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain
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“--You're rather well read for a working-class girl, she said with her back to me. --Really? I've found that all my well-read friends are from the working class. --Oh my. Why do you think that is? The purity of poverty? --No. It's just that reading is the cheapest form of entertainment. --Sex is the cheapest form of entertainment. --Not in this house.”

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Book:Rules of Civility
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“Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality.”

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Author:L.R. Knost
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“Can you read?" the boy said at last. "Of course," said Arrietty. "Can't you?" "No," he stammered. "I mean--yes. I mean I've just come from India." "What's that got to do with it?" asked Arrietty. "Well, if you're born in India, you're bilingual. And if you're bilingual, you can't read. Not so well." Arrietty stared up at him: what a monster, she thought, dark against the sky. "Do you grow out of it?" she asked. He moved a little and she felt the cold flick of his shadow. "Oh yes," head said, "it wears off. My sisters were bilingual; now they aren't a bit. They could read any of those books upstairs in the schoolroom." "So could I," said Arrietty quickly, "if someone could hold them, and turn the pages. I'm not a bit bilingual. I can read anything.”

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Book:Borrowers
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“There were lessons later on. These were going a lot better now she’d got rid of the reading books about bouncy balls and dogs called Spot. She’d got Gawain on to the military campaigns of General Tacticus, which were suitably bloodthirsty but, more importantly, considered too difficult for a child. As a result his vocabulary was doubling every week and he could already use words like ‘disembowelled’ in everyday conversation. After all, what was the point of teaching children to be children? They were naturally good at it.”

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Book:Hogfather
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“The evidence that the gap is to some extent "built in" is certainly consistent with some of these observations. However, advocating alternative forms of literacy seems like poor advice given that print remains an essential medium, and reading skill (the traditional kind) continues to be a prerequisite for engagement with major institutions that greatly affect quality of life. Are alternative literacies a means to empower a minority population or to ensure their disenfranchisement? A bleeding-edge theory that creates additional barriers to print literacy or encourages opting out does not look like progress to me, a higher-SES white person who has benefitted from the traditional concept of literacy. Perhaps these options would be judged differently by parents for whom it has been an obstacle. More likely, they would not have a say in the matter because they would be unaware that this educational theory was being tried out on their children.”

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Book:Language at the Speed of Sight
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“Teaching children to read has been superseded by an emphasis on developing literacy, which includes text, but also using sound, pictures, video, and other media. Reading as I've construed it is hardly a part of literacy in this sense, its role being comparable to spelling or typing. Yet the reading education part—helping children to become skilled readers, to be motivated to read, and to be able to comprehend and interpret texts for various purposes—is not easy.”

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Book:Language at the Speed of Sight
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