Murray says that you must be suspicious of both praise and criticism. He says that we need to critique ourselves of both of them, not just the bad things people say.

This shows how the amish choose to be behind the times we live in today. Normal people do these things as well but the quote shows that they don’t have a lot of contact with each other.

“More importantly, Eli learned that literacy is a force in the world – his world – which imparts power to all those who possess it.” (847)

Eli is one of the kids in the family. This is a big realization for him because he figures out that he needs to have skills in being literate. He knows that if he ever wants to be able to function with modern people, he will have to know how to read and write.

This better shows the difference in acquiring and learning. Acquiring is something that you naturally pick up by being around others who practice the same.

“Learning is a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching, though not necessarily from someone designated a teacher, this teaching involves explanation and analysis”(20)

This quote explains that learning is different from acquiring because you have to be taught through explaining and not just picking it up. Learning is not something that feels necessary like acquiring certain things is.

“Brandt” The Sponsors of Literacy, by Deborah Brandt, National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement, University at Albany, State University of New York, 1997. (Pg. 166-172)

The pages in the novel were about the development of literacy and how many advantages and opportunities that it gives you throughout your life. It is trying to show us a relationship between economies were a majority get schooling tend to do better economically. Centuries ago, when slavery was accepted, economies were able to thrive while only the more fortunate were able to get proper education. As time passed it education became more and more accessible. I enjoyed the passage and some of the creative word choice. I like how she insists that people with the opportunity to get a good education need to do their part in spreading what they’ve learned and helping others get the same chances they had.

“The approach is through what I call sponsors of literacy. Sponsors, as I have come to think of them, are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way.” (Brandt 166)

Brandt is saying that sponsors are people who have knowledge. The people who have better education should do what they can to spread what they know.

“sponsors seemed a fitting term for the figures who turned up most typically in people’s memories of literacy learning: older relatives, teachers, priests, supervisors, military officers, editors, influential authors.” (167)

This shows that sponsors are people we look up to throughout our lives. These are the people who usually have a big influence on who you become. It helps if the people around you support you.

It connects with the our first passage we had to read in some ways. In The Sponsors of Literacy they make points about the past and how fewer people had the opportunity to get an education. They both talk about the benefits of having more people with the ability to read and write.

Will  free education ever be accessible for everyone?

Elbow, Peter. “Pg (359-365).” In Everyone Can Write: Essays toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

The article was about how certain dialects were thought of as inferior and were not able to learn how to write. Throughout history, more and more cultures were accepted and were taught how to write from a young age. We still face a lot of these problems in theses times but not as many. Kids who are never taught how to read or write are at a big disadvantage in our modern society and are almost guaranteed to fail. Thankfully, a majority of the world now has access to schooling and most people.

“To imply to children or adults … that it doesn’t matter how you talk or how you write is to ensure their ultimate failure” (“Silenced Dialogue” 292) pg.361

This shows that kids need to learn how to read and write properly or it will ensure their failure.

“No longer could the homogeneous student population of the pre-War years be assumed, as more and more young people from non-elite backgrounds came to fill the universities in search of access to the privileges of high socioeconomic rank. (Belin and Rudolf qtd. in Boyd 57-58)” pg. 360

This is showing how kids that came from less elite backgrounds started to fill universities after the Civil War.

 It applies to the issues of poverty in the United States today. Kids who are born into households with more wealth have access to more opportunities than families who are struggling. With more opportunities comes a higher chance to be successful.

What would the world be like if certain dialects were still thought of as inferior and were not given proper schooling?