Essence of Literacy

Posted on | September 18, 2008 | No Comments

I recently came across a couple of interesting quotes on literacy that I thought I would share. The first is from Anthony Grayling, from a book review he wrote in 1996:

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.”

And this from Paulo Freire, in Practice of Freedom:

“To acquire literacy is more than to psychologically and mechanically dominate reading and writing techniques. It is to dominate those techniques in terms of consciousness; to understand what one reads and to write what one understands: it is to communicate graphically. Acquiring literacy does not involve memorising sentences, words or syllables – lifeless objects unconnected to an existential universe – but rather an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one’s context.”

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