• Definitions of literacy
• General quotations relating to literacy and learning
• The power of reading
• ICT related
• Modern languages

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Definitions of literacy

Reports about levels of literacy often refer to functional literacy as the borderline separating the literate from the illiterate. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development defines functional literacy not as the ability to read and write but as "whether a person is able to understand and employ printed information in daily life, at home, at work and in the community".

"Literacy can be defined on a number of levels. It is obviously concerned with the ability to read and write but a fuller definition might be the capacity to recognise, reproduce and manipulate the conventions of text shared by a given community." - John Hertrich in the HMI Secondary Literacy Survey

"Literacy is not something separate from English. It is a vital subset of English and it is also an aspect of our communicative abilities. It cannot be separated entirely from oracy, on which it builds, and it is an essential part of the learning process. Literacy is, or ought to be, a shared responsibility - it is too important to leave to English teachers...There are new forms of literacy (on-screen literacy and moving image  media) to consider alongside the more traditional print literacy. Literacy is important because it enables pupils to gain access to the subjects studied in school, to read for information and pleasure, and to communicate effectively. Poor levels of literacy impact negatively on what pupils can do and how they see themselves." - John Hertrich in the HMI Secondary Literacy Survey

"Reading literacy is defined in PISA as the ability to understand, use and reflect on written texts in order to achieve one's goals, to develop one's knowledge and potential, and to participate effectively in society." - Literacy Skills for the World of Tomorrow: further results from PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] 2000, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development/Unesco Institute for Statistics, 2003

"A literate person has the ability to process information critically through interaction of their knowledge of the world and the information that is presented in writing and other media." - South Camden Community School

President Clinton on International Literacy Day, 8 September, 1994: "Literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century we must harness the energy and creativity of all our citizens." 

Michael Fullan, expert on educational change at Toronto University: "The kind of teacher who is afraid that they are going to be replaced by a computer should be."

Paulo Freire, Education:The Practice of Freedom (1973) "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." 

A C Grayling, Financial Times (in a review of A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel, HarperCollins 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." 

From evidence submitted to The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (1999): "I was supposed to be a welfare statistic... It was because of a teacher that I sit at this table. I remember her telling us one cold, miserable day that she could not make our clothing better; she could not provide us with food; she could not change the terrible segregated conditions under which we lived. She could introduce us to the world of reading, the world of books and that is what she did.

Learning To Succeed (1993): "All children must achieve a good grasp of literacy and basic skills early on as the foundation for learning throughout life." 

Margaret Meek, Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education (in conversation 1996): "If there is a full rich literacy for everyone, we can discover what literacy is good for. It's what people do with their reading and writing that is important. Language makes so many things possible."

Margaret Meek, Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, 'On Being Literate': "There are different versions of literacy, some much fuller than others, some much more powerful than others. Where they go to school seems to lead some children to positions of power in adult life even more directly than how they prove their competencies in examinations that are open to all. Literacy is part of our class system..... 
"The great divide in literacy is not between those who can read and write and those who have not yet learned how to. It is between those who have discovered what kinds of literacy society values and how to demonstrate their competencies in ways that earn recognition." 

Neil McClelland, Director (1993-2006), National Literacy Trust: "We want to help create a society in which every member has the appropriate literacy skills to realise their full potential." 

UNESCO Institute for Education, Hamburg: "Literacy arouses hopes, not only in society as a whole but also in the individual who is striving for fulfilment, happiness and personal benefit by learning how to read and write. Literacy...means far more than learning how to read and write...The aim is to transmit ...knowledge and promote social participation." 

David Barton: "Literacy is part of everyday social practice - it mediates all aspects of everyday life. Literacy is always part of something else - we are always doing something with it. Its what we choose to do with it that is important. There are a range of contemporary literacies available to us - while print literacy was the first mass media, it is now one of the mass media."

Peter Schrag, American educationist: "The longest distance in the world is between an official ... curriculum policy and what goes on in the mind of a child."

PJ O'Rourke, American writer:  "Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." 

Professor David Crystal: "Grammar is what gives sense to language ... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar."

Thomas Carlyle: "All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is all lying in magic preservation in the pages of books."

Mark Twain: "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

Groucho Marx: "Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." 

Abraham Lincoln: "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read." 

Dolly Parton, speaking about the Dollywood Foundation in the Radio Times, 22 December 2001: "We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life."

Angela Carter: Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."

Maya Angelou: "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."

Emilie Buchwald: "Children are made readers on the laps of their parents."

May Ellen Chase: "There is no substitute for books in the life of a child."

Coolio: "I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book."

Groucho Marx: "When I picked up your book I was so convulsed with laughter that I had to set it down, but one day I intend to read it"

Dorothy Parker: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

Sir Graham Hills, former principal of Strathclyde University, giving a lecture entitled Knowledge is luggage: travel light, reminding us that even very well-established formats do not have an indefinite shelf-life: "In the future, books will be regarded as 'coffins for words' and libraries as 'cemeteries for books'."

Jane Davidson, education minister for Wales, from an interview in the Financial Times, June 2002: "I don't need a league table to tell me that performance will be better in one of our richer communities than one of our poorer ones."

A young woman attending a children's school in Jahan Shah, Afghanistan, where the overwhelming desire of illiterate young women to learn means that exceptions are made to the rule against allowing mothers to attend their children's lessons: "Learning to read after so long is like walking into light from darkness."

The power of reading

Joe Simpson - The Beckoning Silence: "It occurred to me that the only reason I was here was because of reading; it was the reason I began to climb. There is something about reading which takes you beyond the constrictions of space and time, frees you from the limitations of social interaction and allows you to escape. Whoever you encounter within the pages of a book, whatever lives you vicariously live with them can affect you deeply - entertain you briefly, change your view of the world, open your eyes to a wholly different concept of living and the value of life. Books can be the immortality that some seek; thoughts and words left for future generations to hear from beyond the grave and awaken a memory of another's life."

The Times (February 2007): "There is nothing like going to bed with a good book. Or, failing that, with someone who has read one."

George W Bush: "In this job, there are some simple pleasures that really help you cope. One is books, I mean, books are a great escape. Books are a way to get your mind on something else."

Mohandas Gandhi: "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

Ezra Pound: "Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. "

Lyndon Baines Johnson: "A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance."

Dr. Seuss: "The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."

Confucius: "No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."

Samuel Johnson "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."

S.I. Hayakawa "It is not true we have only one life to love, if we can read, we can live as many lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish."

Maya Angelou: "When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young."

Walt Disney: "There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island."

Hazel Rochman: "Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."

Oprah Winfrey: "The reason I love books is because they teach us something about ourselves."

Geri Halliwell: "For me reading was always the great escape without getting your fingers burnt. It's like taking drugs without the hangover."

Jacqueline Wilson: "I have this belief that children become readers before they can read. They become hooked on books because they were read aloud to as a child."

Keir Bloomer, President of the Association of Directors in Education, ADE conference, Edinburgh, November 1999: "In an information-rich age, who will ensure that it is not only the rich who have information?" 

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, from his book Weaving the Web: My motivation was to make sure that the Web became what I'd originally intended it to be - a universal medium for sharing information."

PG Wodehouse's The Luck of the Bodkins: "Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French." - quoted by Alan Moys, secretary of the Nuffield Inquiry into Modern Languages.