We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.
Interpretation
Reading is a skill we created and must teach to each new generation, as we are not born with the ability to read.
Maryanne Wolf highlights that reading is an acquired skill rather than an inherent ability. Unlike speaking, seeing, or thinking, reading is something we, as humans, have developed and must actively instruct each new generation to master. This emphasizes the importance of education and the deep connection between language development and cognitive growth.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literacy in schools.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
Real knowledge, like every thing else of the highest value, is not to be obtained so easily. It must be worked for, β studied for, β thought for, β and more than all, it must be prayed for.
I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student.
Too many years away from academia renders you pretty incompetent at research and teaching. So I had to go back.
What are called 'public schools' in many of America's wealthy communities aren't really 'public' at all. In effect, they're private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.
When I was 11, I knew that I wanted to write a kid's book and tell the world what it was like being deaf.
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
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