Literacy is power.
In Gary Paulsen's novel, Nightjohn, a slave who returns to the plantation after tasting freedom in the north secretly begins to teach ten-year-old Sarny to read. As she scratches the letter "A" in the dirt and sounds it out, she puzzles: Why should this innocuous act come with such severe punishments? Nightjohn responds:
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"Cause to know things, for us to know things, is bad for them. We get to wanting and when we get to wanting it's bad for them. They thinks we want what they got." (1) | |
Nearly two-thirds of the world's adult illiterates are women. (2) Recently we have become aware of the restrictions on Afghan women, wrapped in burqas and banned from attending schools. Yet in the United States over 20% of the adult population continue to read so poorly that they cannot "fill out an application, read a food label, or read a simple story to a child." (3) Denial of full participation in a democracy is "perhaps the single most consistent outcome of the education offered to poor children in the schools of our large cities," asserts Jonathan Kozol about the savage inequalities in education from New York to Saint Louis to San Antonio. (4)
| In class you have performed one experiment that scientists use to isolated DNA, and have seen examples of how this genetic code is used to determine the identity of victims from the World Trade Center disaster or establish paternity in a lawsuit. In June 2000 scientists completed laying out the 3.2 billion units of A's, T's, G's and C's---the DNA code that makes up the human genome. |  |