A few months ago I was browsing the internet and I came across a quote that had me thinking.
"The poor and the affluent are not communicating because they do not have the same words. when we talk of the millions who are culturally deprived, we refer not to those who do have access to good libraries and book stores, or to museum and centers for the performing arts, but those deprived of the words with which everything else is built, the words that open doors. Children without words are licked before they start. The legion of the young wordless in the urban and rural slums, eight to ten years old, do not know the meaning of hundred of words which most middle class people assume to be familiar to much younger children. Most of them have never seen their parents read a book or magazine, or heard words used in other rudimentary ways related to physical needs and functions. Thus is cultural fallout caused, the vicious circle of ignorance and poverty reinforced and perpetuated.
Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble".Peter S. Jennison
Our beautiful country of Trinidad and Tobago is contaminated with delinquency and crime, is the inability to read the cause? Then we as reading specialist can make a change.
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