"Illiteracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... used to these interruptions and eruptions of illiteracy on our part. I think she rather enjoys them, as in the presence of such complete ignorance as ours her lamp of ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... who fear the foreign vote will learn eventually that there are more American-born women in the United States than foreign-born men and women; and those who dread the ignorant vote will study the statistics and see that the percentage of illiteracy is much smaller ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... no books were found in his house, this is the reason why his solicitor, Thomas Greene, lived with him in his house at New Place (Halliwell-Phillipps: Outlines, 1889, Vol. i, p. 226);—a well-known fact that very much puzzles those who do not realize the depth of Shakspeare's illiteracy. ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... gives the whites. In all this educational business the South reasons that the blacks must be kept well in the rear of the whites, because they are to remain a permanently inferior class. That section is not anxious to reduce the illiteracy of its colored population and to raise the standard of their intelligence, for it thinks that an ignorant labor class is less difficult to manage than an intelligent one. Ignorance is indeed apt to ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke
... from the fact that in some specimens the stamp has only a single "T," the result, probably, of illiteracy on the ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... good work. This evangelical fire burned strong in him despite the crude shifts he was put to, the loneliness, the perplexities and trials of the spirit. Just as an educated humanitarian coming upon an illiterate people would gladly banish their illiteracy, so Thompson was resolved to banish what he deemed the spiritual darkness of these primitive folk. Holding as he did to the orthodoxy of sin and salvation, of a literal heaven and a nebulous sort of hell, he deemed it his business to show them with certainty ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... whole or in part by the State, nation, or by the proceeds of any tax levied upon any community. Make education compulsory so far as to deprive all persons who can not read and write from becoming voters after the year 1890, disfranchising none, however, on grounds of illiteracy who may be voters at the time this amendment ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... in life that lies too deep for any mere change of environment to touch. Sammy remembered a lesson the shepherd had given her: gentle spirit may express itself in the rude words of illiteracy; it is not therefore rude. Ruffianism may speak the language of learning or religion; it is ruffianism still. Strength may wear the garb of weakness, and still be strong; and a weakling may carry the weapons of strength, but fight with a faint heart. So, beneath all the changes that ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... knew half those things," she said, and became depressed at her relative illiteracy. It was natural, after such encouragement, to write to the scholastic agents in a tone of ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... their belief that their capital is the most wonderful city in the world, and their Shah the greatest monarch extant. These extreme ideas are, of course, considerably improved upon when we leave the ranks of illiteracy; but the Persians capable of forming anything like an intelligent comparison between themselves and a European nation, are confined to the Shah himself, the corps diplomatique, and a few prominent personages who have been abroad. Always on the lookout for something to please ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... ascendency they engaged in commerce, became owners of real estate and buildings, including saloons and dance-houses, debased their churchly functions, discouraged attempts at progress, practically forbade the printing of secular books and papers, making illiteracy, with its attendant vice, poverty, and superstition, universal; and when Dr. Jose Rizal urged his reforms in the church and civil service, he was shot, though not as a blasphemer, but because his secret order, the Katipunan, with its Masonic ritual and blood initiation, was thought to be dangerous ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... regarded as tending directly to the encouragement of infidelity. I copied a great quantity of maps, and read all the books of travels that I could find. But I acquired no mathematics, no languages, no history, so that I was in danger of gross illiteracy in these important departments. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... explained, striving to hide the depths of his illiteracy; "my eyes don' gone back on me. I reckon I better go down to The Forge and get specs, but jes' now I'd like to have light on ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the English Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans. English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... committee also suggests the heroic element in our work. It brings to mind the obstacles and difficulties which we are called upon to overcome. The illiteracy of the colored people is a fact immense in extent and dark in its prophetic significance. Your hearts were rejoiced, I know, by the statements of the changes going on in the education of the colored children in several States through free schools. The need of this movement will be appreciated when ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 3, March 1888 • Various
... guess I do. He's a heart as big as a house, and the manner to scare a 'hold-up.' He's the grit of a reg'ment of soldiers and the mutton softness of a kid girl. He's the brain of a Solomon, and the illiteracy of a one day school kid. He's all those things, and he's the biggest proposition in men I've ever heard tell about. It's kind of tough. Don't you feel that way? He'll suck a pint of tobacco juice in the day, and blaspheme till ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... the preceding chapter reference was made to the illiteracy of our ancestors in its bearing upon trade usages. In the present chapter we propose to supplement this allusion by drawing attention to a feature of commercial life which was certainly influenced by, if not actually due to, the prevailing lack of education. ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... change their lot. As everywhere else, Russia has been the beacon-flare. Since 1918 an extraordinary tenseness has come over the lives of the frugal sinewy peasants who, through centuries of oppression and starvation, have kept, in spite of almost complete illiteracy, a curiously vivid sense of personal independence. In the backs of taverns revolutionary tracts are spelled out by some boy who has had a couple of years of school to a crowd of men who listen or repeat the words after ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... brought up in a poor household, in an age when illiteracy, alas! seemed the natural fate of the poor. But you could no more have kept education from her than you could have kept food from a hungry lioness. She was determined to get it somehow, and get it she ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... amendments. Some causes of failure. Story of Iowa election. Woman's Christian Temperance Union proves forty-seven varieties of corruption. South Dakota. Foreign vote defeated Woman Suffrage there. Figures of some counties. Relation between Prohibition and Woman Suffrage votes. West Virginia. Illiteracy and conservatism defeated Woman Suffrage there. Liquor influence felt. Corruption in Berkely County, West Virginia. Special Legislative session called but investigation of frauds abandoned. Analysis of vote ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... suited him so well; that he was tired of farming and thought he would go back to what he called the 'wild West.' Jake Marpole, lured by Otto's stories of adventure, decided to go with him. We did our best to dissuade Jake. He was so handicapped by illiteracy and by his trusting disposition that he would be an easy prey to sharpers. Grandmother begged him to stay among kindly, Christian people, where he was known; but there was no reasoning with him. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... and his family. All sorts of slurs and gossip were reported to him by busybodies, until it became a settled purpose with Boone to make the Sprague family feel heavy heart-burnings for the sum of the affronts he had endured. It was to them he attributed the whispered gibes about his illiteracy; his shady business methods; the awful story of his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, the spendthrift brother of the Misses Perley. Once, too, when he had so well manipulated the district delegates that he was ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Eritrea's economic future remains mixed. The cessation of Ethiopian trade, which mainly used Eritrean ports before the war, leaves Eritrea with a large economic hole to fill. Eritrea's economic future depends upon its ability to master fundamental social problems like illiteracy, unemployment, and low skills, and to convert the diaspora's money ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... read of tiny schoolhouses, where boys, and sometimes girls, were taught to read and write. Where there were no schools, fathers and mothers of the better kind gave their children the rudiments of learning. Though illiteracy was widespread, there is evidence to show that the diffusion of knowledge among the masses was making steady progress all ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... Colombian people have many fine traits; that there is among them a circle of high-bred men and women which would reflect honor on the social life of any country; and that there has been an intellectual and literary development within this small circle which partially atones for the stagnation and illiteracy of the mass of the people; and I also know that even the illiterate mass possesses many sterling qualities. But unfortunately in international matters every nation must be judged by the action of its Government. The good people in Colombia apparently ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... dress provoked ridicule; their poverty often threw them upon the community; the large percentage of illiteracy among them evoked little sympathy; their inclinations towards intemperance and improvidence were not neutralized by their great good nature and open-handedness; their religion reawoke historical bitterness; their genius for ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... servant, a Colored minister. Hosier was one of the notable characters of that day. He was the first American Negro preacher of the M. E. Church in the United States. In 1780 Mr. Asbury alluded to him as a companion, suitable to preach to the Colored people. Dr. Rush, allowing for his illiteracy—for he could not read—pronounced him the greatest orator in America. He was small in stature and very black; but he had eyes of remarkable brilliancy and keenness; and singular readiness and aptness of speech. He travelled extensively with Asbury, Coke, and Whiteworth. He afterward travelled ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... has very largely aided in maintaining a considerable amount of illiteracy in the United States in spite of the effects of the propaganda for popular education which has been carried on now for the last fifty years or more. In 1900 there were still 6,246,000 illiterates above the age of ten years in the United States, which was 10.7 per cent of ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... before discovering a more enthusiastic people than the teachers and the scholars of the Southern uplands. The appalling extent of illiteracy among the descendants of Marion's men finds a parallel in their pathetic desire for ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... as they learned of the gifts bestowed by the wife of their employer. They regarded the new bath-tubs with wonder, albeit somewhat doubtfully. They discussed the library with appreciation, or lack of appreciation, according to their degrees of illiteracy or learning: the socialistic element condemned the inanity of the volumes selected; there were only histories, biographies, books of travel, foolish novels and the like—nothing to teach the manner by which the brotherhood of ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... But it was not new. This conception of the book clerk is one of the world's seven jokes—brother to that of the mother-in-law. The book clerk of this view is a familiar figure in the pages of humour, like the talkative barber or the comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage—a stock character. His illiteracy is classic; his ignorant sayings irresistable. He was sired by Charles Keene and damned by Punch. Phil May was his godfather; and every industrious humourist employs him periodically. These two ideas of the book business ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... the conviction of Negroes who had received sentences of death for rape, and asserted that, at least in capital cases, where the defendant is unable to employ counsel and is incapable adequately of making his own defense because of ignorance, illiteracy, or the like, it is the duty of the court, whether requested or not, to assign counsel for him as a necessary requisite of due process of Law. The duty is not discharged by an assignment at such time ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... donor really means business I shall be prepared to supply him with one or two rare and special examples myself. I possess tributes to the English effort written by Portuguese, Japanese and Belgians; and paeans by Englishmen which excel, as regards both simplicity of sentiment and illiteracy of construction, any foreign composition. Birmingham is not noted for very many things. It is, we know, the only large city in the country which remains solidly Tory in election after election. It ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... came Helen. A new man had swum all unexpectedly into her ken and she was busy cataloguing him. He looked the native in this environment, but for all that he was plainly a man of her own class. No illiteracy, no wild shy awkwardness marked his demeanour. He was as free and easy as the north wind; he might, after all, be likeable. Certainly it was courtois of him to set himself on foot to be one of them. The mare looked gentle despite ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... ranks third from the bottom in the United States in illiteracy, and Jordan County ranks third from the bottom in this state! We have a public school system which lasts only five months in the year!' That was ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... War time influence of D'Annunzio. Increasing cost of living. Secretarial courses. The most beautiful city of the American continent. Alfalfa. Women surgeons. The blimp. Democracy in Great Britain compared with that of the United States. The root of the Mexican problem. San Marino. Illiteracy in the United States. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... the figures of the Thirteenth Census, we find that there were five and one-half million illiterate Americans of whom 3,184,633 were white. Remembering that illiteracy is a crude and extreme test of ignorance, we may assume that there are in the United States ten million people over ten years of age who are too ignorant either to perform their civic duties or to teach industrial efficiency. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... foreign countries—of such rule as preceded the French Revolution—he thought as poorly as most men think; but for the aristocracy of England he had a singular esteem. It is true that he gave it a nickname; that he poked fun at its illiteracy and its inaccessibility to ideas; that he was impatient of "immense inequalities of condition and property," and huge estates, and irresponsible landlordism; that he contemned the "hideous English toadyism" and "immense vulgar-mindedness" of the Middle ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... service has also been rendered in writing letters for the great mass of ignorant soldiers to their families in the far-off Indian villages, miles away from a railway. Illiteracy, superstition, and false rumors existed at both ends of the line. Here is a man who has had no word from home since he left a year or more ago. He hears a baseless rumor or heeds some inborn fear that his child is sick, ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... all the wards of the city, it is found that the birth-rate rises as one considers the wards which are marked by a large foreign population, illiteracy, poverty and a high death-rate. On the other hand, the birth-rate falls as one passes to the wards that have most native-born residents, most education, most prosperity—and, to some extent, education ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... are typical of whole sections of the country, or accents inherited from European parents must not be confused with crude pronunciations that have their origin in illiteracy. A gentleman of Irish blood may have a brogue as rich as plum cake, or another's accent be soft Southern or flat New England, or rolling Western; and to each of these the utterance of the others may sound too flat, too soft, too harsh, too ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... sacrifice which the history of our country presents. But there still remains the great problem of freeing the black man from the slavery of ignorance, superstition and sin. The work increases upon our hands. The South is struggling to rise. It has this problem of illiteracy to settle. We who have grown since the war could not carry a musket in '62, but we are willing to carry the Speller and the Bible now, and we do not consider this work one whit less honorable or necessary than the art ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 7. July 1888 • Various
... founded by Jesse Atwood, of Wellfleet, Cape Cod, in 1778, and has become known, since then, as a place where skilful farmers and brave sailors could always be found. It also kept Maine supplied for years with oldest inhabitants. It is said that the name was an accident of illiteracy, and that it is the only place in the world that owes its title to bad spelling. The settlers who followed Atwood there were numerous enough to form a township after ten years, and the name they decided on for their commonwealth was Orangetown, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... has inherited the entire coastline of Ethiopia and has long-term prospects for revenues from the development of offshore oil fields, offshore fishing, and tourism. Eritrea's economic future depends on its ability to master fundamental social and economic problems, e.g., overcoming illiteracy, promoting job creation, expanding technical training, attracting foreign investment, and ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... authors represented in this little pioneer volume one should bear continually in mind the many handicaps under which authorship labors in Portuguese and Spanish America: a small reading public, lack of publishers, widespread prevalence of illiteracy, instability of politics. Under the circumstances it is not so much to be wondered at that the best work is of such a high average as that it was done at all. For in nations where education is so limited and illiteracy ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... things were common knowledge, with almost no attempt at concealment, and indeed little notion that there might be anything reprehensible in such customs. Every one did it, why shouldn't any one? Later experience proved these conditions, as well as nearly 90 per cent. of complete illiteracy, common to all Honduras. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... faked illiteracy was a pure surmise, a mere possibility, until now, when it gains color from the evidence of the footprints. A mental twist that would make a small man disguise himself as a large one would make an educated man resort to illiteracy. ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... perhaps because of something in his heart awakened by the fact that he was going to his boyhood home, the man felt, as he had never felt before, his kinship with them all. With wealth and poverty, with culture and illiteracy, with pleasure and crime, with sadness and joy, as evidenced in the lives of those who passed in the crowd, the man felt a sympathy and understanding that was strangely new. And, more than this, he saw that each was kin to the other. He saw that, in spite ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... Line of Educational Activity: Every genuinely democratic power must, in the domain of education, in a country where illiteracy and ignorance reign supreme, make its first aim the struggle against this darkness. It must acquire in the shortest time universal literacy, by organising a network of schools answering to the demands of modern pedagogics; it must introduce universal, obligatory and free tuition for all, ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... said that the fundamental problem in this question of immigration is most frequently overlooked. Back of the statistics of illiteracy, pauperism, criminality, and the economic value of immigrants lies another one of great proportions. What has been the effect upon our native stock? What has been the expense, to our native stock, of this increase of population and wealth through immigration? The decreasing ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Swedish and Russian in Finland, Polish and Russian in Lithuania, Magyar in Slovakia and at the same time to prohibit the publication of books and newspapers in the mother-tongue of the country has been, in the first place, to create an artificial illiteracy and, in the second, to create in the minds of native peoples a sense of social and intellectual inferiority to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... clergy were not, as a body, very much of a force in education or literature. Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their passion for gaming and hunting. Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander Whitaker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in furtherance of those ends Good News from Virginia, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... while numbering 35 per cent of the whole, received but 12 per cent of the school funds. The average white teacher received $745 a year, and the Negro teacher $450. In the great reduction of the percentage of illiteracy in the race from 70 in 1880 to 30.4 in 1910 the missionary colleges—those of the American Missionary Association, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the Freedmen's Aid Society—played a much larger part than they are ordinarily given credit ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... information. Somehow if a man's stomach is empty and his head clear as a bell, and if he won't drink and won't smoke, he reaches out for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers all though, instead of only reading the headings. He clamours for articles filled with statistics about illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of battleships in ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... But though these mountain people have missed contact with the outside world and have been deprived of the stimulus of new ideas, they seldom give evidence of anything that can fairly be classed as degeneracy. Ignorance, illiteracy, and suspended or arrested development the traveler of today will find among them, and actions which will shock his present-day standards; but these same actions would hardly have shocked his own father's great-grandfather. These isolated mountaineers ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... receive in exchange for his production of food. On the whole the peasant himself eats rather more than he did before the war. But he has no matches, no salt, no clothes, no boots, no tools. The Communists are trying to put an end to illiteracy in Russia, and in the villages the most frequent excuse for keeping children from school is a request to come and see them, when they will be found, as I have seen them myself, playing naked about the stove, without boots or anything but a shirt, if that, in which to go and learn to ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... a voter on January I, 1867, or his son or his grandson, or any person naturalized prior to January 1, 1898, if applying for registration before September 1, 1898, might vote, notwithstanding both illiteracy and poverty. Separate registration lists were provided for whites and blacks, and a longer term of residence required in State, county, parish, and precinct before voting than by ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Poets.' Vol. 23 is delightful—do tell me about Vol. 23. Are you doing much in the British Poets? But when the deuce, you wonderful being, do you find time to read? I don't find any—it's too hideous. One relapses in London into such illiteracy and barbarism. I have to keep up a false glitter to hide in conversation my rapidly increasing ignorance: I should be so ashamed after all to see other people NOT shocked by it. But teach me, teach me!" he ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... greatly increased. The educational awakening is universal and healthy. Notwithstanding the disastrous cyclone of 1898, and the confusion incident to a radical governmental reorganization, the wealth per capita has increased, the home life is improved, and the illiteracy of the people ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... autocratic state that reaped the victory, not the reformed religion, which was first used as a tool and then abandoned to its inevitable break-up into numberless antagonistic sects, some of them retaining a measure of the old faith and polity, others representing all the illiteracy and uncouthness and fanaticism of the new racial and social factors as these emerged at long last from the submergence and the oppression that had been their fate with the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... Farm Children Getting More Schooling than American Farm Children No Illiteracy in the New Japan Where Five Acres Is a Large Farm How Iowa Might Feed the Whole United States Farming Without Horses or Oxen What the Japanese Farmers Raise The Crime of Soil-waste All Work Done by Hand Cooperative Credit Societies a Success Farm Houses Grouped in ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... and Knollys, had been preachers in New England; but some were laymen who had recently assumed the preaching office, or been called to it by congregations, on account of their natural gifts. The Presbyterians laid great stress on the illiteracy of some of the Baptist preachers and their mean origin. Barebone was a leather-seller in Fleet Street; and, according to Edwards or his informants, Paul Hobson was a tailor from Buckinghamshire, who had become a captain in the Parliamentary Army; Kiffin had been servant to a brewer; Oates was ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... common to other races, but are in a vast measure greater, because of the past and present difficulties. The masses furnish the most difficult problem to solve. How can we rescue them from poverty and illiteracy, and not pauperize them? How can we prevent crime, check immorality and decrease mortality? The answer lies in giving to them better home life, more elevating social surroundings, better educational ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... fellows), for freedom and for equal rights. It is no mere pretty sentimentality that puts the flag there, but the serious recognition of the bed-rock principle of our Union: That we are all of one blood, one bounden duty; that all these anti-social prejudices are just as shameful as illiteracy, and that they must disappear as soon as ever we shall come to know each other well. Knowledge is power. That is true. And it is also true: A house divided against ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... startling to find that the United States census for 1910 reports a greater percentage of illiteracy among native whites of native parentage than among native whites of foreign parentage. The proportion of children from five to fourteen years attending school is greater among those of foreign parentage and foreign birth than among native Americans ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... books receive a favourable review. For Belloc did not hesitate to call Lord Northcliffe a traitor for the way in which he had attacked Kitchener, while Cecil amused himself by reviewing and pointing out the illiteracy of that strange peer's own writing. Later too when the Harmsworth papers were in full cry for the fall of Asquith and the substitution of Lloyd George, the New Witness took a strong stand. They pointed out too the way in which censorship was ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... for our compulsory education"—he snapped his fingers contemptuously—"just what does it amount to? Simply this: it didn't pay the owners to allow illiteracy! An educated workman is a better dividend-producer than an ignorant one. That's all there is to it, Reblong! Don't fool yourself into thinking that the commission has done all this for ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... furnished frequent contributions to various periodicals, and has gained a special reputation as a writer upon politico-economic subjects. Two of these contributions recently published in the form of a brochure by D. Lothrop & Co., under title of "Illiteracy and Mormonism," have attracted especial attention among those interested in these important questions. When residing in New York he was President of the Political Science Association, and Chairman of ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... they receive education, and profit by it, is another indication of their capacity for advancement. True, there is still an appalling illiteracy among them, some 70 per cent. of them in the South being unable to write. But we must remember that hardly a quarter of a century ago it was a crime to teach one of them to read; they were sedulously kept in compulsory ignorance, and since ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... in boats, which at least is a life of variety, and in winter they can go into the woods for firewood. The women hang forever over the stove or the washtub, go into the stages to split the fish, or into the gardens to grow "'taties." Yet oddly enough, there is less illiteracy among the women ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... through Parliament a series of measures—co-ordinated in the royal decree of September 24—by which the property qualification was reduced from forty lire to nineteen lire eighty centesimi and the age limit was lowered to twenty-one years. The disqualification of illiteracy was retained, and a premium was placed upon literacy by the extension of the franchise, regardless of property, to all males over twenty-one who had received a primary school education. There were minor ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the dark period of slavery and illiteracy followed by instruction in the Bible, the light of the world; the development of the native preacher of the gospel as a leader, the organization of the church, followed by the Sunday school, the week-day school, the academy, normal, public ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... good will come for all the world, especially for Europe. We Germans are the most industrious, the most earnest and the best-educated race on this side of the ocean. To-day one-fourth of the population of Belgium cannot read and write. Under German influence illiteracy will disappear from among them. Russia stands for reaction; England for selfishness and perfidy; France for decadence. Germany stands for progress. Do not believe the claims of our foes that our Kaiser wishes to be another Napoleon and hold Europe ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... also interesting memorials of his times. If that age be compared and contrasted with the present, the difference cannot fail to make us exult in living, breathing, and acting in a region of intellect and freedom, which is all sunshine and happiness, opposed to the gloom and illiteracy which darkened the days of Aubrey. Even Harvey, Wren, Flamsteed, and Newton, his contemporaries and friends, were slaves and victims to the superstition and fanaticism of ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... already sounded the alarm in the appalling figures which mark how dangerously high the tide of illiteracy has risen among our ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... In the long term, Eritrea may benefit from the development of offshore oil, offshore fishing, and tourism. Eritrea's economic future depends on its ability to master fundamental social and economic problems, e.g., by reducing illiteracy, promoting job creation, expanding technical training, attracting foreign investment, and streamlining the bureaucracy. The most immediate threat to the economy, however, is the possible expansion of the border conflict with Ethiopia, which broke out in May ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... owing to the fact that the less-knowing women had now come upsides with the more-knowing men; or that with the Restoration, female education went out of fashion, and women sank back again into elegant illiteracy, I leave to the historian to discover; I only, as a lexicographer, record the fact that from the Restoration the dictionaries are silent about the education of women, till we pass the Revolution settlement and reach the ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... supplies unsatisfactory evidence of desirable citizenship or a proper apprehension of the benefits of our institutions. If any particular element of our illiterate immigration is to be feared for other causes than illiteracy, these causes should be dealt with directly, instead of making illiteracy the pretext for exclusion, to the detriment of other illiterate immigrants against whom the real cause of complaint ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... think again of the problems which were before us when Spain added those which are to ask our attention. The greater problem before the American people is not any new one. The Christianization of nearly three millions of colored people yet in illiteracy and moral darkness is a call to Christian love and service as loud as any call can possibly be. The messages of the gospel of Peace, have the only promise of salvation to these millions in darkness at our own doors. To give this to these needy ones, who are not only near to our doors but ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... safe for the next General Synod to go out there?" Let me tell your readers just two or three things about Kansas. Her educational exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair took the highest prize; her per cent of illiteracy is the lowest of all the States of the Union; her regiment, the 21st of Kansas, was the only regiment of the 65,000 men at Chickamauga Park during the late war with Spain in which every man could write his own name on the muster ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... of our population above ten years of age cannot read or write in any language, and that 5 million of our foreign population cannot use English. An active campaign is now being conducted to teach English to foreigners and to eradicate illiteracy. A bill has recently been introduced in Congress to provide Federal aid ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... endeavoring to mislead the people, and reviewed with sympathy the great progress that had been made since the war. He pleads guilty to the charge of having new light and is glad of it. He points out with keen insight the illiteracy of the masses of the Southern people and the lack of educational facilities. A movement for the development of a public school system in the South was led by J. L. M. Curry, a Confederate soldier of Georgia stock. He became an evangelist in the crusade for public education, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the front of the skirt over her knees. Over her dress a black silk blouse, lavishly trimmed with black beads, was worn for a wrap, and a pair of men's brown shoes, sans laces, completed her costume. Due to illiteracy Dosia has retained the dialect of the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... more than $700 million over the next 10 years for a federal compassion capital fund, with a focused and noble mission, to provide a mentor to the more than 100 million children with a parent in prison, and to support other local efforts to fight illiteracy, teen pregnancy, drug addiction and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... on the 24th of March. Mr. Johnson did not live to resume his seat. On the last day of the ensuing July (1875) he died peacefully at his home in East Tennessee among friends who had watched his progress from poverty and illiteracy to the highest position in the Republic. He was in the sixty-seventh year ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... preserved from that time, except two that were sent to a Keokuk weekly, the Saturday Post, and as these were written for publication, and are rather a poor attempt at burlesque humor—their chief feature being a pretended illiteracy —they would seem to bear no relation to this collection. He roomed that winter with a rugged, self-educated Scotchman—a mechanic, but a man of books and philosophies, who left an impress on Mark ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... year and a half I have been bombarding Congress with a demand for a bill that would make a campaign, through the schools, against illiteracy. I have made dozens of speeches for it, written a lot, lobbied much, until Congress passed a law stopping my working up sentiment for it, by a joint resolution. How much sentiment has the press created? You had one or two editorials. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... literature, less of music, nothing of art, and has but a superficial smattering of science. Of matters relating to his life and activities on the farm he has heard almost nothing. The rural child is not illiterate, but he is too close to the border of illiteracy for the demands of a twentieth-century civilization; it is fair neither to ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... act on its description and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and unveracity), he has perforce become a journalist, and has to keep up an air of high spirits through a daily struggle with his own illiteracy and the precariousness of his employment. He has a note-book, and occasionally attempts to make a note; but as he cannot write shorthand, and does not write with ease in any hand, he generally gives it up as a bad job before he succeeds ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw |
