Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope... Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition.
Interpretation
Literacy empowers individuals, especially girls and women, to improve their lives and their families' situations.
Kofi Annan emphasizes the transformative power of literacy, highlighting how it serves as a crucial bridge leading individuals, particularly girls and women, out of poverty and into a realm of hope and opportunity. He underscores that literacy is not only about reading and writing but also plays a vital role in enhancing family health and nutrition, thus affecting community wellbeing.
In practice
A school assembly focusing on the importance of education for girls.
If you have a problem and you can't find a solution, you meet again tomorrow and you keep talking until you find a solution. You can disagree with behavior or a particular position, but you do not resort to calling an opponent worthless.
Let us remember the large numbers of citizens who, day in and day out, through acts of volunteerism large and small, bring hope to so many of the world's disadvantaged. Let us ensure that this wonderful resource, available in abundance to every nation, is recognized and supported as it works towards a more prosperous and peaceful world.
We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.
The global HIV/AIDS epidemic is an unprecedented crisis that requires an unprecedented response. In particular it requires solidarity - between the healthy and the sick, between rich and poor, and above all, between richer and poorer nations. We have 30 million orphans already. How many more do we have to get, to wake up?
People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what β and who β we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.
Democracy is, in essence, a form of non-violent conflict management. If war is the worst enemy of development, healthy and balanced development is the best form of conflict prevention.
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.
When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.
I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
You canβt learn your craft by copying me or anyone else. I hope what I do can do is in some way inspire others but I would be appalled if I thought my work was being studied as βthe right way to do the jobβ. My way is just one of an infinite number of ways to do the job.
I would tell him that shoot me but first listen to me. And I would tell him that education is my right and education is the right of your daughter and son a well. And I'm speaking up for them. I'm speaking up for peace.
The junior high schools and high schools of America have forgotten to teach one of the most important courses of all. Investing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.