International Literacy Day in Mongolia: “A young girl studies during class break. With rapid growth, the Government of Mongolia introduced a number of programs to improve the country’s education system, especially rural primary education. Photo: Khasar Sandag/World Bank”
I almost never remember on time: September 8 is International Literacy Day, a day designated by the United Nations to celebrate literacy.
From the Dag Hammerskjöld Library:
Literacy is a cause for celebration since there are now close to four billion literate people in the world. However, literacy for all – children, youth and adults – is still an unaccomplished goal and an ever moving target. A combination of ambitious goals, insufficient and parallel efforts, inadequate resources and strategies, and continued underestimation of the magnitude and complexity of the task accounts for this unmet goal. Lessons learnt over recent decades show that meeting the goal of universal literacy calls not only for more effective efforts but also for renewed political will and for doing things differently at all levels – locally, nationally and internationally.
In its resolution A/RES/56/116, the General Assembly proclaimed the ten year period beginning 1 January 2003 the United Nations Literacy Decade. In resolution A/RES/57/166, the Assembly welcomed the International Plan of Action for the Decade and decided that Unesco should take a coordinating role in activities undertaken at the international level within the framework of the Decade.
The additional resources links on this page are provided for information purposes only and do not necessarily represent an endorsement by the United Nations.
It’s fascinating to me that activities on International Literacy Day seem to be noted in out-of-the-way U.S. newspapers, and even there not much. Do Americans care about literacy, really?
I half expect the Texas State Board of Education to pass a resolution condeming literacy, since the UN worries about it.
Save
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Maurice Sendak, to his death, held on to some of his childhood concerns; and he worried about how we teach our children to deal with the world, and those scary things.
I almost never remember on time: September 8 is International Literacy Day, a day designated by the United Nations to celebrate literacy.
From the Dag Hammerskjöld Library:
Literacy is a cause for celebration since there are now close to four billion literate people in the world. However, literacy for all – children, youth and adults – is still an unaccomplished goal and an ever moving target. A combination of ambitious goals, insufficient and parallel efforts, inadequate resources and strategies, and continued underestimation of the magnitude and complexity of the task accounts for this unmet goal. Lessons learnt over recent decades show that meeting the goal of universal literacy calls not only for more effective efforts but also for renewed political will and for doing things differently at all levels – locally, nationally and internationally.
In its resolution A/RES/56/116, the General Assembly proclaimed the ten year period beginning 1 January 2003 the United Nations Literacy Decade. In resolution A/RES/57/166, the Assembly welcomed the International Plan of Action for the Decade and decided that Unesco should take a coordinating role in activities undertaken at the international level within the framework of the Decade.
The additional resources links on this page are provided for information purposes only and do not necessarily represent an endorsement by the United Nations.
It’s fascinating to me that activities on International Literacy Day seem to be noted in out-of-the-way U.S. newspapers, and even there not much. Do Americans care about literacy, really?
I half expect the Texas State Board of Education to pass a resolution condeming literacy, since the UN worries about it.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
At a blog called Frugal Café Blog Zone, “Where it’s chic to be cheap… Conservative social & political commentary, with frugality mixed in,” blogger Vicki McClure Davidson headlined the piece:
Cold in winter. They don’t expect it. These warming denialists provide the evidence those crabs need, who wonder whether there shouldn’t be some sort of “common sense test” required to pass before allowing people to vote, or drive, or have children.
Oh, it gets worse:
Another site picked up the post. No, seriously. (Has Anthony Watts seen this yet?)
Voting Female [I am convinced that is a sock puppet site designed to insult women; no woman could be that stupid, could she?]
Earth at northern solstice - Wikimedia image
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
What came after Paul Revere’s ride? The Battle of Lexington, and the Battle of Concord.
Longfellow’s poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” was written in 1860, 23 years after Emerson wrote “The Concord Hymn” for the dedication of the monument to the Minutemen at Concord Bridge.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Two earthquakes ravage American nations, tsunamis, freakishly large snowstorms, still trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran in turmoil and ruled by some sort of crazy, North Koreans still starve so the nation can make a nuclear sabre to rattle.
Another prominent, but much more reasonable Republican member of the SBOE also lost: Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, in Dallas. Miller was so expected to win that race that almost no one was watching, and little is in public about the winner of the race.
Election results from Tuesday’s primary election in Texas mean that the State Board of Education will change dramatically. It would be almost impossible for any of the changes to be bad ones. McLeroy led the anti-evolution force on the board. McLeroy was the ringleader to gut and racialize English standards earlier, and he’s been the point man in the attempt to gut and de-secularize social studies standards.
Board member Cynthia Dunbar, another “social conservative,” did not run for re-election.
In the governor’s race, anti-education, anti-science Gov. Rick Perry won big over the state’s popular Republican U.S. Sen. Kay Hutchison. Third place in that race went to the Teabagger candidate.
No Teabagger won any race in Texas.
It’s not that Texas has suddenly gained reason. The dissension on the SBOE, demonstrated by the Texas Senate’s rejection of McLeroy’s renomination to be chairman of the body, just got to be too much. Texans like their crazies to be sane enough to get things done, and not so noisily crazy as to attract attention to the state’s shared insanity.
Sunlight cast on the actions of the board, especially by groups like the Texas Freedom Network, informed Texans. And now the people of Texas have spoken.
* Does Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub have any readers in Pocatello? Pocatello readers: Do you know of anyplace you can get a copy of Burned to read, in Pocatello?
As often, slam-poetry veteran (and former teacher) Taylor Mali has important advice for people who trust computers too much: “The Impotence of Proofreading.”
Um, this probably isn’t really safe for work, at least not in Texas or Alabama, and maybe not advisable for classroom use either. But every English teacher in your school will have horror stories to add:
Am I the only one who thinks that reading a lot is a great way to overcome these problems?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
I once met … at a centenary celebration of some kind … the grandchild of a man who moved as a teenager from the old country to southern Wisconsin, ahead of his family, to learn the local customs, farming techniques, and language. After a few years in a small town in Wisconsin, his family arrived to start farming. The young man had indeed learned the local practices, the local farming techniques, and the local language. German. His family, arab speakers from Palestine, were well served by this young man because German was all they needed to get along in the US.
Here’s the citation on the study Greg Laden wrote about:
M. E. Wilkerson, J. Salmons (2008). “GOOD OLD IMMIGRANTS OF YESTERYEAR,” WHO DIDN’T LEARN ENGLISH: GERMANS IN WISCONSIN American Speech, 83 (3), 259-283 DOI: 10.1215/00031283-2008-020 [you’ll need a paid subscription for the full text]
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Vigilantes sometimes check out the books they want to ban, and then simply don’t bring the book back to the library. If there’s no book on the shelf to be checked out, they reason, no one else can check it out. One such vigilante in Lewiston, an activist in favor of homophobia it appears, refused even a court order to return the book she wanted to ban, Robie Harris’s It’s Perfectly Normal.
Cover of Robie Harris's children's health book, It's Perfectly Normal
But today I stumbled across this list, below, and I’ll wager it contains no more than one or two books Palin has actually read. You’ll understand why I say that at the end of the list. The list is fascinating to me, more for its brevity than for anything it contains. Who would have thought?
The list (alphabetical by author):
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou.
The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker.
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, Taylor Branch.
Living History, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Lincoln, David Herbert Donald.
Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot.
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison.
The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, David Fromkin.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez.
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney.
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed,Terror,and Heroism in Colonial Africa,Adam Hochschild.
The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis.
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius.
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, Reinhold Niebuhr.
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell.
The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, Carroll Quigley.
The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron.
Politics as a Vocation, Max Weber.
You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe.
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright.
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, William Butler Yeats.
September 8 was International Literacy Day. It’s one day a year to help promote the decade-long project of the United Nations General Assembly, through UNESCO, to improve literacy across the planet.
Despite many and varied efforts, literacy remains an elusive target: some 774 million adults lack minimum literacy skills; one in five adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women; 75 million children are out-of-school and many more attend irregularly or drop out.
But then, most of us missed each of the previous five International Literacy Days of the Literacy Decade. The good news is that we still have five opportunities before the end of the Literacy Decade, in 2012. The other good news is that the celebration will probably continue past 2012, as it has for nearly 40 years already.
But enough of the celebration — how about doing something about literacy and reading? Start out with this great post from Farm School, with dozens of links to and about good, mostly sorta new books you ought to be reading and giving to your kids.
Who do you kiss on International Literacy Day? An author? A publisher? A bookseller? A librarian? A teacher of reading? A reader?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
We had to take a semester of typing in high school. Computers back then were readers of stacks of punch cards, but the idea was that those students bound for college would need to know how to type to do term papers, and the other students would be able to use typing as a job skill. I got up to 90 words per minute for a short period.
One of my majors was mass communication. I wrote a lot of radio news scripts, and I wrote constantly for the Daily Utah Chronicle. Utah’s debate team was quite active, too, and we typed our evidence cards so they’d be easier to share. By my junior year, almost everything handed in was typewritten.
After one lousy year of grad school I took a job as press secretary for a U.S. Senate campaign. It was a shoe-string operation, and I typed all our press releases myself — plus the few prepared speeches. Three years later we had computers to use for press releases and speech texts in the Senate. My office was the first in the Senate to completely automate the process. By the time I moved to the President’sCommission on AmericansOutdoors, we had PCs on everybody’s desk (ahead of our time, I know). At the Department of Education a couple of years later, we even had a crude e-mail system.
Moving to American Airlines was a shock. As counsel, I was expected to write everything in long-hand, so the secretary could type up the final copy. Having been wholly keyboard for way over a decade, I couldn’t make the switch. I had to find a surplused, still-barely-working typewriter to give stuff to the secretary. By the time I left four years later, everybody had PCs on their desks (and at least half the secretarial positions were gone, too). That was my last experience with long-hand as the norm, until I got to the Dallas Independent School District.
Our kids didn’t learn cursive long or well. Younger son James doesn’t do much in cursive at all (thank you notes are a problem, of course). Older son Kenny has keyboards on everything, and probably types better than I do. I didn’t worry much about it.
Is that true? Does writing improve literacy and numeracy?
That would explain a lot about my students’ inabilities in both areas, and it would suggest we need to do a lot more writing, and a lot more note-taking. It would suggest that our drive to technology has damaged our skills in an unexpected way.
What do you think? Does anyone know if there is an actual study on the topic? Comments open.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
Error: Please make sure the Twitter account is public.
Dead Link?
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 