I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of death ...among Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocr...atic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true.... Yet now ... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Educational ... legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that the...ir illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it w...as a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »