literacy

America the Illiterate

Sep 1, 2016
The change from a print-based to an image-based society has transformed our nation. All the traditional tools of democracies—including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate—are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.
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Stephen King: If You Don’t Read, ‘You’ve Got the Army, Iraq’

May 6, 2008
Author Stephen King made an appearance last month at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where he discussed, among other things, the importance of literacy. As King put it: "I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that."

When Teachers Are the Dropouts

Apr 26, 2008
Much is made of the dropout rate in America's schools, and usually it's the students who are the focus of the discussion. But what happens when teachers themselves opt out of their roles in the classroom? [In this short analysis, Truthdig educational expert Paul Cummins looks at teachers' heartbreak, frustration and depression.]

Public Schools Mulling Bible Literacy Class

Jan 27, 2006
The high school course on the Bible's influence on society would be an elective storyIt's such an obvious end run around the Constitution's Establishment Clause that we'll hold fire But check this: The course textbook contains a boxed feature that shows how the Bible was used "to justify and even encourage anti-Semitism" Wow! A whole boxed feature? We wonder if there's a footnote about that whole Spanish Inquisition thing .