It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.

We're learning how important it is both to preserve sibling relationships if they work and repair them if they're broken. We're also learning a lot about nonliteral siblings - stepsiblings half-siblings - and the surprising power they can have.

Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life the peaceful walks of literature and learning to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past ordinary people respected learning. They respected books and they don't now or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

The learning process is something you can incite literally incite like a riot.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama learning the literature on evolution what was known about it biologically just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular scientific view of the world.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

Religious speech is extreme emotional and motivational. It is anti-literal relying on metaphor allusion and other rhetorical devices and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.