Hugh Mackay Quotes

I'm concerned, as I guess all middle-aged people are, about the younger generations' level of literacy.

I didn't learn the alphabet until I was 11.

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

You have to be literate in today's world. We're not going to get away with not teaching boys to read.

No skill shapes a child's future success in school or in life more than the ability to read.

The kids who speak well, are articulate and intelligent, are all readers.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

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.

In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.'

George W. Bush was a little sub literate.

I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.

Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips.

I can read and write in Hindi.

The same plasticity that allows us to form a reading circuit to begin with, and short-circuit the development of deep reading if we allow it, also allows us to learn how to duplicate deep reading in a new environment. We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there.

Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge.

The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.

Reading might not be the way that the child engages with the world, but it should be something that they all learn how to do, and that they get to have for themselves, as opposed to somebody telling them what to do and how to do it.

Yet in our enthusiasm for the idea that everyone should be able to read and write fluently, we may be missing a crucial point: in today's culture, finely honed literacy skills are simply not as important as they once were.

Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

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.

We are the worst of fools if we do not teach every child to become truly expert, deep readers.

We have to move into the 21st century, but we should do so with great care to build a 'bi-literate' brain that has the circuitry for 'deep reading' skills and, at the same time, is adept with technology.

The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.

One way to ensure that all kids will be successful in school and life is by focusing on literacy by the end of the third grade.

I want children to learn to develop deep reading skills in the beginning in print. I believe the physicality of print is much better in the beginning for children, and then help them learn how to use their deep reading skills on digital medium.