They just keep coming. Writing a guest article in the Listener on the importance of kids reading, Christine Fernghough came out with this cracker.
“Literacy is a fundamental right…”
No it’s not Christine; you just made that up. The give-away as always is the word “fundamental”. As I’ve explained often enough before; going back to the 1931 share-market crash it’s been constantly trotted out as an adjective to an assertion, to infer its truth is so obvious as to need no explanation.
Christine’s article otherwise trotted out the obvious re reading’s merit and in particular, the alarming current state of affairs attendance-wise in our schools, particularly with maori kids. This FUNDAMENTALLY, as we know, is attributable to colonisation.
But she missed the big one, specifically no mention of cell-phone addiction which more than any other factor is responsible for declining literacy and general ignorance.
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When I grew up, there were two fundamentals. The basics of mathematics and the orifice. If you didn’t learn the first one, you got a boot up the second.
My departed father used to say “your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins”.
There are lot of tossers swinging their arms about these days and my patience is wearing thin. I think there are quite a few cadidates for the “Vaughan/Mayo” treatment, if you follow my drift.
How long before having a smartphone is deemed a human right?
Is it not already? It seems to take precedence over walking talking and driving
If literacy is a fundamental right, then prior to the arrival of Europeans, Maori were deprived of a fundamental right.
Hurrah for colonialism, which brought it to them!
Today seems to be about rights and privileges, rather than responsibility and meaning – to quote Jordan Peterson.