Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

The Path to Freedom
to undermine democracy at its roots.
If Frederick Douglass as an enslaved child could teach himself
into literacy and greatness, why should anyone in our more
enlightened day and age remain unable to read? Well, it's not that
simple, in part because few of us are as brilliant and courageous as
Frederick Douglass, but for other important reasons as well.
If you grow up in a household where there are books, where
you are read to, where parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins
read for their own pleasure, naturally you learn to read. If no one
close to you takes joy in reading, where is the evidence that it's
worth the effort? If the quality of education available to you is
inadequate, if you're taught rote memorization rather than how to
think, if the content of what you're first given to read comes from
a nearly alien culture, literacy can be a rocky road.
You have to internalize, so they're second nature, dozens of
upper- and lower-case letters, symbols and punctuation marks;
memorize thousands of dumb spellings on a word-by-word basis;
and conform to a range of rigid and arbitrary rules of grammar. If
you're preoccupied by the absence of basic family support or
dropped into a roiling sea of anger, neglect, exploitation, danger
and self-hatred, you might well conclude that reading takes too
much work and just isn't worth the trouble. If you're repeatedly
given the message that you're too stupid to learn (or, the
functional equivalent, too cool to learn), and if there's no one
there to contradict it, you might very well buy this pernicious
advice. There are always some children - like Frederick Bailey -
who beat the odds. Too many don't.
But, beyond all this, there's a particularly insidious way in
which, if you're poor, you may have another strike against you in
your effort to read - and even to think.
Ann Druyan and I come from families that knew grinding
poverty. But our parents were passionate readers. One of our
grandmothers learned to read because her father, a subsistence
farmer, traded a sack of onions to an itinerant teacher. She read
for the next hundred years. Our parents had personal hygiene and
the germ theory of disease drummed into them by the New York
Public Schools. They followed prescriptions on childhood nutrition
recommended by the US Department of Agriculture as if
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