Quotes About Literacy

Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year.

Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

This gap in understanding between books and screens is big enough that in elementary-school children, it's the equivalent of two-thirds of a year's growth in reading comprehension.

the more a child is read storybooks—something the parents, more than the kid, choose—the better they are at reading other people's emotions.

The biggest impact my father had on my life was teaching the importance of literacy.

No skill shapes a child's future success in school or in life more than the ability to read.

Reading is a key feature in the life of every single successful person I have ever met.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education ... We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse.

A person who does not read is no better than one cannot read.

Sono convinto che chi non legge resta uno stupido. Anche se nella vita sa destreggiarsi, il fatto di non ingerire regolarmente parole scritte lo condanna ineluttabilmente all'ignoranza, indipendentemente dai suoi averi e dalle sue attività.

I believe that anyone who doesn't read remains dumb. Even if they know how, failing to regularly ingest the written word dooms them to ignorance, no matter what else they have or do.

TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book.

It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.

So many words! It would take seven lifetimes to learn them all.

Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.

In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don't reach Africa and we are being left behind.

One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augusta, GA.

In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan.

If, in the schools, the classical language would no longer be taught, whom could we entrust with the writing of memorials, documents, letters and notes in the public service? How could we possibly assign important offices and heavy responsibilities to someone who cannot even write fluently?

Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at 'proper' books, which means books without pictures.

But to this day - I'm very literate now, I love to read, I read constantly - words don't resonate the way they do to a person with a formal education. They're like a maze, a puzzle that has to be opened up.

We are the worst of fools if we do not teach every child to become truly expert, deep readers.

As the border between physical and digital gets more permeable, a new kind of literacy emerges. And that literacy is built on a foundation of code - whether it's the codes of letters and words, or the code of bits and algorithms.