Be
a Hero for a Better World ... Every Act of Kindness Makes
a Difference!
Literacy
& Education
*
Learning
is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with
ardor and attended to with diligence.
-- Abigail
Adams
*
"Everyone deserves the best start in life, which
is what UNICEF is working to provide the world's
most vulnerable children. Education is essential
to a child's development. I hope that as an Ambassador
I can encourage people to join UNICEF's mission
to make education a reality for children throughout
the world."
-- Clay
Aiken
International
Literacy Day is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate
the importance of literacy to individuals and their
communities, and to honor the teachers and volunteers
who are making a difference by helping children and
adults learn to read and write.
-- Robert
Alan Silverstein
It
is time for parents to teach young people early on
that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
-- Maya
Angelou
*
Literacy
unlocks the door to learning throughout life, is essential
to development and health, and opens the way for democratic
participation and active citizenship."
~ Kofi
Annan
Acquiring
literacy is an empowering process, enabling millions to
enjoy access to knowledge and information which broadens
horizons, increases opportunities and creates alternatives
for building a better life.
~ Kofi
Annan
'literacy
is at the heart of sustainable development'
~ Kofi
Annan
On
this International Literacy Day, let us recall that literacy
for all is an integral part of education for all, and that
both are critical for achieving truly sustainable development
for all.
~ Kofi
Annan
"Literacy
is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily
life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty,
and a building block of development, an essential complement
to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy
is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the
promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially
for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and
nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along
with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy
is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through
which every man, woman and child can realize his or her
full potential."
~ Kofi
Annan
"Education
is a human right with immense power to transform. On its
foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and
sustainable human development."
~ Kofi
Annan
Knowledge
is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise
of progress, in every society, in every family."
~ Kofi
Annan
"These
children and their parents know that getting an education
is not only their right, but a passport to a better
future - for the children and for the country."
-- Harry
Belafonte
"Creating
a world that is truly fit for children does not
imply simply the absence of war. It means having
the confidence that our children would not die of
measles or malaria. It means having access to clean
water and proper sanitation. It means having primary
schools nearby that educate children, free of charge.
It means changing the world with children, ensuring
their right to participate, and that their views
are heard and considered. It means building a world
fit for children, where every child can grow to
adulthood in health, peace and dignity."
-- Carol
Bellamy
Think
about it: Every educated person is not rich, but almost
every education person has a job and a way out of poverty.
So education is a fundamental solution to poverty.
-- Governor Kathleen Blanco
"Education
makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy
to govern but impossible to enslave."
-- Baron Henry Peter Brougham
*
Peace
is no mere matter of men fighting or not fighting. Peace,
to have meaning for many who have known only suffering
in both peace and war, must be translated into bread
or rice, shelter, health, and education, as well as
freedom and human dignity - a steadily better life.
If peace is to be secure, long-suffering and long-starved,
forgotten peoples of the world, the underprivileged
and the undernourished, must begin to realize without
delay the promise of a new day and a new life.
-- Ralph
J. Bunche
“The
aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of
values.”
-- William S. Boroughs
It is
possible to store the mind with a million facts and still
be entirely uneducated.
-- Alec Bourne
*
"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."
- President
Bill Clinton on International Literacy Day, September
8th 1994
Change
does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably
requires change. Education is essential to change, for education
creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.
-- Henry Steele Commager
we
cannot afford to settle for being just average; we
must leran as much as we can to be the best that we
can. The key word is education -- education with maximum
effort. Without it, we cannot be in charge of ourselves
or anyone else.
-- Bill
Cosby
"The
new education must be less concerned with sophistication
than compassion. It must recognize the hazards of tribalism.
It must teach man the most difficult lesson of all—to
look at someone anywhere in the world and be able to
see the image of himself. The old emphasis upon superficial
differences that separate peoples must give way to education
for citizenship in the human community. With such an
education and with such self-understanding, it is possible
that some nation or people may come forward with the
vital inspiration that men need no less than food. Leadership
on this higher level does not require mountains of gold
or thundering propaganda. It is concerned with human
destiny. Human destiny is the issue. People will respond."
-- Norman
Cousins
*
"Peace
does not fare well where poverty and deprivation reign.
It does not flourish where there is ignorance and a
lack of education and information. Repression, injustice
and exploitation are inimical with peace. Peace is gravely
threatened by inter-group fear and envy and by the unleashing
of unrealistic expectations. Racial, class and religious
intolerance and prejudice are its mortal enemies."
-- Frederik
W. de Klerk
*We
live in a complex world and the motivation to use
violence to solve problems needs to be seriously questioned.
It is essential that we help our children perceive
peaceful alternatives. We need to use these troubled
times as an opportunity to create a new vision for
the future.
-- Naomi
Drew
“Education
is that whole system of human training within and
without the school house walls, which molds and develops
men.”
-- W.
E. B. DuBois
Children
learn more from what you are than what you teach."
-- W.
E. B. DuBois
*
We
now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process
of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing
task is to teach people how to learn.
-- Peter
F. Drucker
Just
because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is
no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights
to health care, education and proper nutrition.
-- Marian
Wright Edelman
"We
must inoculate our children against militarism, by
educating them in the spirit of pacifism... Our schoolbooks
glorify war and conceal its horrors. They indoctrinate
children with hatred. I would teach peace rather than
war, love rather than hate." -- Albert
Einstein
“Intellectual
growth should commence at birth and cease only at
death” -- Albert
Einstein
Only
the educated are free.
-- Epictetus
*
Unicef's
education initiative does not seek to impose, but
to initiate and integrate. It does, however, aim to
address the huge bias towards education for boys at
the expense of girls in so many cultures.
-- Ralph
Fiennes
Education's
purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
-- Malcolm Forbes
"A
nation of well informed men who have been taught to
know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot
be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny
begins."
-- Benjamin
Franklin
An education
isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how
much you know. It's being able to differentiate between
what you do know and what you don't.
-- Anatole France
Education
either functions as an instrument which is used to
facilitate integration of the younger generation into
the logic of the present system and bring about conformity
or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by
which men and women deal critically and creatively
with reality and discover how to participate in the
transformation of their world.
-- Paulo
Freire
"People
are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement
is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain
when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong
to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants,
mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development....
But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain
sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea
of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)
"The
ultimate object of education should be, Gandhi said,
to help create not only a balanced and harmonious
individual but also a balanced and harmonious society
where true justice prevails, where there is no unnatural
division between the "haves" and the "have-nots,"
and where everybody is assured of a living wage and
the right to live and the right to freedom."
-- Arun
Gandhi
"If
we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we
are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have
to begin with the children."
-- Mohandas
K. Gandhi
"Next
in importance to freedom and justice is popular education,
without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently
maintained."
-- James A. Garfield (1880)
"If
we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to
enhance our children's mastery over the tools needed
to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives."
-- Danny
Glover
"Since
every effort in our educational life seems to be directed
toward making of the child a being foreign to itself,
it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to
one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each
other.” -- Emma
Goldman
“The
most violent element in society is ignorance.”
*
No
one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy,
kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child.
The effort of every true education should be to unlock
that treasure."
No one
has ever died, from an overexposure to education.
-- Robert M. Hensel
We
have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education
We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural
literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse. -- E. D. Hirsch,
Jr.
"...the
anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their
fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces
their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives
them away from the material being studied into strategies
for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really
don't know."
-- John Holt
"If
you look back in history, you will find the core mission
of public education in America was to create places of civic
virtue for our children and for our society. As education
undergoes the rigors of re-examination and the need for
reinvention, it is cruicial to remember that the key role
of public schools is to preserve democracy and, that as
battered as we might be, our mission is central to the future
of this county."
-- Paul D. Houston, Executive director of the American Association
of School Administrators
Bigotry
is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm
of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion
are the antidotes of both.
-- Thomas
Jefferson
*
"Having
visited Oxfam-funded school programs in rural communities
has made me realise how vital education is to developing
countries in bringing people out of poverty and
giving them a sense of dignity, self-worth and confidence."
-- Scarlett
Johansson
"I'm
not a statistician, but it doesn't take a genious
to work out that 100 million children being denied
an education is ridiculous. There is nothing lost
in translation here, it's obvious that's wrong.
-- Scarlett
Johansson
Just
remember the world is not a playground but a schoolroom.
Life is not a holiday but an education. One eternal
lesson for us all: to teach us how better we should
love.
-- Barbara
Jordan
*
"The highest result of education is tolerance."
-- Helen
Keller (1903)
"Let
us think of education as the means of developing our
greatest abilities, because in each of us there is
a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be
translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength
for our nation."
-- John
F. Kennedy
Leadership
and learning are indispensable to each other.
-- John
F. Kennedy
"Our
progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress
in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource."
-- John
F. Kennedy
We
teach academic subjects and we assume life skills
will somehow be acquired along the way. Not a safe
assumption! The curriculum has to include things like
communication, conflict resolution, parenting, family
dynamics, critical thinking, values, ethics.
-- Azim
Khamisa
*
"Peace is a culture that we create by putting it in
the curriculum for young people, through creating
this next generation where young people get a chance
to go across borders, across cultures, to learn more
about each other's life, to create a global community,
learn about opportunities for helping others. It's
investing in peace and tolerance training, ending
the gap between rich and poor."
-- Craig
Kielburger
Remember
that consciousness is power. Consciousness is education
and knowledge. Consciousness is becoming aware. It
is the perfect vehicle for students. Consciousness-raising
is pertinent for power, and be sure that power will
not be abusively used, but used for building trust
and goodwill domestically and internationally. Tomorrow's
world is yours to build. -- Yuri
Kochiyama
There
are all kinds of things you can do to marry literacy
with health.
-- C.
Everett Koop
The
foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
-- Diogenes Laertius
*
That
everyone may receive at least a moderate education
appears to be an objective of vital importance."
-- Abraham
Lincoln
"Upon
the subject of education, not presuming to dictate
any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that
I view it as the most important subject which we as
a people may be engaged in. That everyone may receive
at least a moderate education appears to be an objective
of vital importance."
-- Abraham
Lincoln
Reading
furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge;
it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
-- John
Locke
The
improvement of understanding is for two ends: first,
our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable
us to deliver that knowledge to others.
-- John
Locke
Education
begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and
reflection must finish him.
--
John
Locke
"The
important thing is not so much that every child should be
taught, as that every child should be given the wish to
learn."
~ John Lubbock
Obviously,
every child should be given the best possible opportunity
to acquire literacy skills.
-- Hugh Mackay
Parents
should be encouraged to read to their children, and teachers
should be equipped with all available techniques for teaching
literacy, so the varying needs and capacities of individual
kids can be taken into account.
-- Hugh Mackay
Universal
literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and
writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly
educated class of professional people.
-- Hugh Mackay
Education
is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change
the world.
-- Nelson
Mandela
*
“I
don't think anybody anywhere can talk about the future
of their people or of an organization without talking
about education. Whoever controls the education of
our children controls our future.”
-- Wilma
Mankiller
"As
an empowerment right, education is the primary vehicle
by which economically and socially marginalised adults
and children can lift themselves out of poverty, and
obtain the means to participate fully in their communities."
-- Koďchiro
Matsuura, UNESCO Director-General
International
Literacy Day is an occasion to celebrate the importance
of literacy to individuals, communities and societies everywhere
-- Koďchiro
Matsuura, UNESCO Director-General
It
is intolerable that around 1 in 5 of the world's adults
are illiterate. How can we build equitable information societies
or thriving democracies if so many remain without the basic
tools of literacy?
-- Koďchiro
Matsuura, UNESCO Director-General
it
is inconceivable that poverty eradication can make much
headway in the absence of major advances in literacy.
-- Koďchiro
Matsuura, UNESCO Director-General
Achieving
the right to basic education for all is thus one of the
biggest moral challenges of our times.
-- Koďchiro
Matsuura, UNESCO Director-General
A literate
world is a possible and desirable one. There are enough
resources. What is now needed is the collective will of
the international community to ensure that the necessary
support is forthcoming.
-- Koďchiro
Matsuura, UNESCO Director-General
Unless
we teach children peace, someone else will teach them
violence.
-- Colman
McCarthy
"Children not only have to learn what their parents
learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn.
This has to be recognized as a new problem which is
only partly solved."
~ Margaret
Mead (1901-1978) US anthropologist, author, environmentalist.
"...Why
is compassion not part of our established curriculum,
an inherent part of our education? Compassion, awe,
wonder, curiosity, exaltation, humility - these are
the very foundation of any real civilisation, no longer
the prerogatives, the preserves of any one church,
but belonging to everyone, every child in every school."
-- Yehudi
Menuhin
"Literacy
is not, as it is considered in our schools, a PORTION of
education. It IS education. It is at once the ability AND
the inclination of the mind to find knowledge, to pursue
understanding, and out of knowledge and understanding, not
out of received attitudes and values or emotional responses,
however worthy, to make judgments."
-- Richard Mitchell
““One
test of the correctness of educational procedure is
the happiness of the child.”
– Maria
Montessori
Establishing
lasting peace is the work of education; all politics
can do is keep us out of war.”
– Maria
Montessori
"Teach
love, generosity, good manners and some of that will
drift from the classroom to the home and who knows,
the children will be educating the parents. Lets face
it; the children who do that are the hope of tomorrow."
-- Sir
Roger Moore
Over the next two years UNICEF will focus on improving
access to and the quality of education to provide
children who have dropped out of school or who work
during school hours the opportunity to gain a formal
education! Roger Moore
-- Sir
Roger Moore
We
have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing
in our students and our schools. We must make sure
that people who have the grades, the desire and the
will, but not the money, can still get the best education
possible.
-- Barack
Obama
"The
principle goal of education is to create men who are capable
of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other
generations have done - men who are creative, inventive
and discoverers"
-- Jean Piaget (Swiss Psychologist and pioneer in the study
of child intelligence, 1896-1980)
*
Thinking about how the world might be and envisioning
a society characterized by justice are the essence
of conceptualizing the conditions that comprise positive
peace. If we are to educate for peace, both teachers
and students need to have some notion of the transformed
world we are educating for.
-- Betty
Reardon
are
we doing enough to help our children create a more
peaceful world?
-- Debbie
Robins
What
is truly more important, how our children do on standardized
tests or what kind of human beings they are and will
become? I believe it is our obligation, as mothers,
to get peace into our classrooms so our children can
study, learn and practice peace. Then, and only then,
can we rest assured they will fulfill their divine destinies
as peacemakers and the world will become a more peaceful
place.
-- Debbie
Robins
our
children are viscerally aware of the heightened violence
on this planet. It has permeated every aspect of their lives.
They are hungry to make a difference, desperate to affect
their reality in a positive way, but they are unsure of
how to do it.
-- Debbie
Robins
What
is the solution? To make peace a class, in every school,
at every grade level, in classrooms all over the world so
our children can learn the 'art' of getting along, which
isn't easy, reflected by the current state of the world
-- Debbie
Robins
*
Tolerance,
respect and patience are acquired skills, they are learned
attributes, practiced choices, and until our children begin
to study, learn and practice peace, I believe this is as
good as it gets.
-- Debbie
Robins
"It is because modern education is so seldom
inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves
great results. The wish to preserve the past rather
than the hope of creating the future dominates the
minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
" -- Bertrand
Russell
Education
is critical for people to become compassionate. If
you don't know the problem and you don't know the
reality, how can you help?
-- Marla
Ruzicka
"One of the greatest gifts adults can give -- to their
offspring and to their society -- is to read to children."
-- Carl
Sagan
*
Our
species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds
wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world
works. -- Carl
Sagan
In every
country, we should be teaching our children the scientific
method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes
a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the
demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human,
this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping
darkness. -- Carl
Sagan
*
Imparting
education not only enlightens the receiver, but also
broadens the giver - the teachers, the parents, the
friends. -- Amartya
Sen
we must
go on fighting for basic education for all, but also emphasize
the importance of the content of education. We have to make
sure that sectarian schooling does not convert education
into a prison, rather than being a passport to the wide
world. -- Amartya
Sen
The
elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy... and of needless
inequalities in opportunities (is) to be seen as objectives
that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom
to lead the lives we have reason to value, and these elementary
capabilities are of importance on their own -- Amartya
Sen
*
"We
know that many boys and girls leave school because
of poverty, because they have to work. However, there
are an important number of children who abandon their
studies because of the abuses they're subject to by
teachers and their own parents." -- Shakira
*
Poverty and lack of knowledge must be challenged.
-- Russell
Simmons
Education
is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
-- B. F. Skinner
The
great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
-- Herbert Spencer
"The
illiterate of the 21st centurywill not be those who cannot
read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and
relearn."
-- Alvin Toffler
What
makes me angry? The education of children. How in
God's name can you expect to have a functioning society
the way we teach our kids?
-- Kathleen
Turner
Because
there is global insecurity, nations are engaged in
a mad arms race, spending billions of dollars wastefully
on instruments of destruction, when millions are starving.
And yet, just a fraction of what is extended so obscenely
on defense budgets would make a real difference in
enabling God's children to fill their stomachs, be
educated, and be given the chance to lead fulfilled
and happy lives.
-- Desmond
Tutu
*...just
a fraction of what is extended so obscenely on defense
budgets would make a real difference in enabling God's
children to fill their stomachs, be educated, and be
given the chance to lead fulfilled and happy lives.
-- Desmond
Tutu
"Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live
in a community responsibly is the center of an education."
-- Alice
Waters
"To
have a peaceful population, we must teach peace."
-- Cora
Weiss
Education
and democracy have the same goal: the fullest possible
development of human capabilities.
-- Paul
Wellstone
*
"I
fervently believe that, as someone has said before,
"When you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change." I want to help
change the way young people look at school, and hence,
the way they look at their futures."
-- Kanye
West
Only
that education deserves emphatically to be termed
cultivation of the mind which teaches young people
how to begin to think.
-- Mary
Wollstonecraft
“Education
is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in
the world's work, and the power to appreciate life.”
-- Brigham Young
"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."
-- UNESCO Institute for Education, Hamburg
