PD James, The Murder Room (London: Penguin, 2003), 12.
It is interesting that life drawing came from the belief that the human figure was the embodiment of beauty, and that then the beauty part was soon forgotten.
Opposing “construction” to “instruction” only indirectly refers to constructivist pedagogies based on the theories of John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget. Here it refers only to the placement of power in the teaching process.
Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (San Diego: North Point Press, 1988), 6.
It is worth pointing out that, historically, the passage from oral to written culture in the West was much slower and complex than literacy education would imply. Dictation was one of the transition stages. People in power did not necessarily know how to write and would dictate to scribes. When documents were copied, it was not a given that the copyist would know how to read, since it was believed that a non-reader what make more faithful copies than a reader who understood the text (Illich and Sanders, 45). The original owner of the second-hand book by Illich and Sanders from which I took this information made some interesting notes in the margin of the page. He reminded me that today many texts are sent to Asian countries for keying into a computer, the originals often being in English and copied by non-English speakers (note on margin by Michael Comveau, ca. 1992, on page 45).
The Making of Literate Societies, ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001), 6.
Fernando Báez, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books (New York: Atlas & Co., 2008), 126. In a petition to Queen Isabel, Nebrija wrote: “Soon Your Majesty will have placed her yoke upon many barbarians who speak outlandish tongues. By this, your victory, these people shall stand in a new need; the need for the laws the victor owes to the vanquished, and the need for the language we shall bring with us” (cited in Illich and Sanders, 68–69).
See K. David Harrison, When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
After the independence of Uganda, Milton Obote analyzed the adoption of English as the official language, aware that there was no alternative: “The Ugandan National Assembly should be a place where Uganda problems are discussed by those best able to discuss them, and in our situation it would appear that those best able to discuss our problems are those who speak English. This is a reasoning that cannot be defended anywhere; there is no alternative at the present moment.” Kwesi K. Prah, “The Challenge of African Development,” in Olson and Torrance, 130–131.
See The New London Group, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” Harvard Educational Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 1996).
Olson and Torrance, 10.
Utz Maas in “Literacy in Germany” opposes this view, pointing out that written linguistic rules are too different for this first form of codification to be useful in the second. In Olson and Torrance, 94–95.
Charles K. Ogden, Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (London: Paul Treber, 1930), available at href="http://ogden.basic-english.org/be1.html">→. In the introduction Ogden writes: “If it be asked: why 500 words, why 850 words, why 1,000 words; why not 750 or 1,100, or even 1,234, since there is no magic in numbers?—the answer is that Basic is severely practical. Inasmuch as there are limits set (a) by the number of words which can be legibly printed on the back of a single sheet of note paper, (b) by the capacity of humans to assimilate symbols in thirty to fifty hours, (c) by the minimum first stage that is complete in itself, certain definite frames are indicated to which the linguistic material of a universal language must endeavor to adapt itself.”
“Representative” means that the signs represent some part of art’s conventional system, of which figuration is one of multiple choices.