Simón Rodríguez, “Consejos de amigo: Dados al Colegio de Lacatunga” (ca. 1845), in Obras Completas (Caracas: Ediciones del Congreso de La República, 1988), 2:45.
Gregory Chaitin, Meta Math! The Quest for Omega (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 125.
The relation between language and social class of course continues to inform distinctions such as “well spoken” and “vulgar.” Recently a Uruguayan presidential candidate (a former president of the senate and minister of agriculture who had been imprisoned for twelve years as a “subversive”) was derided in an editorial for his language: “(He) introduced onto the political battlefield a language completely alien to our traditions. Formally, he resorted and continues to resort to vulgar expressions, inappropriate to a life of cultivated relations.” (Introdujo en la lid política un lenguaje completamente ajeno a nuestras tradiciones. Formalmente, recurrió y recurre a expresiones vulgares, impropias de una vida de relación culta.) El País, June 16, 2009.
In my minutes I had described the chair of the meeting as chewing her lunch while she was expressing her thoughts. I concede that I didn’t like this person.
The incident came back to mind when I read Elsie Rockwell’s “The Uses of Orality and Literacy in Rural Mexico: Tales from Xaltipan,” in The Making of Literate Societies, ed. David Olson and Nancy Torrance (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).
“Analfabeto se sente impotente, diz pesquisadora,” Folha de São Paulo, June 14, 2009.
As early as the late 1980s it was already established that the use of computers, by placing emphasis on e-mail correspondence and other activities separate from skill acquisition, sped up the literacy process. See Jo Anne Kleigfen, “Computers and Opportunities for Literacy Development,” ERIC/CUE Digest 54, →.
Ibid.
James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 33.
PD James, The Murder Room, Penguin Books, London 2003, p.12
→Continued in issue #11: ALPHABETIZATION, Part Two: Hegemonic Language and Arbitrary Order.