John Steinbeck Quotes

If learning to read was as easy as learning to talk, as some writers claim, many more children would learn to read on their own. The fact that they do not, despite their being surrounded by print, suggests that learning to read is not a spontaneous or simple skill.

After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read.

The dear good people don't know how long it takes to learn to read. I've been at it eighty years, and can't say yet that I've reached the goal.

If you want to work on the core problem, it's early school literacy.

I didn't read at all until I was 12. I just couldn't. It was too frustrating.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.

I was reading at a third-grade level until the age of 30 before I made the decision that I was going to learn how to read.

I was never much of a reader. I'm a slow reader, which is unusual, because I'm so into language and I love words so much. But it's hard for me to read.

Johnny can get down and Johnny can throw up, but Johnny can't read.

If we are always reading aloud something that is more difficult than children can read themselves then when they come to that book later, or books like that, they will be able to read them - which is why even a fifth grade teacher, even a tenth grade teacher, should still be reading to children aloud. There is always something that is too intractable for kids to read on their own.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

The elementary school must assume as its sublime and most solemn responsibility the task of teaching every child in it to read. Any school that does not accomplish this has failed.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

Children have to be motivated to want to learn to read. Reading must not be taught simply as a school exercise.

I know what not being able to read can do to a child's confidence.

I've heard from pre-K and kindergarten teachers alike that the Common Core is inappropriately pushing written literacy standards when the focus should be on the development of oral literacy skills. And that's actually delaying the development of literacy.

We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.

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'm a bit dyslexic so I found learning to read hard. I muddled up the letters but learnt to power through.

All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.

President Bush said that our kids must be taught how to read. He said if his aides never learned to read, they'd never be able to tell him what's in the newspapers every day.

Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children's hands early and often.

I was born in North London in 1947. I didn't learn to read until I was almost 8-partly bad schooling, and partly I suspect slight dyslexic problems. My father, driven mad by this, taught me to read. At 9 I began writing.

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.