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 In short, “all knowing depends on the structure of the knower” and “every act of knowing brings forth a world”.

In rural America, only 60 percent of households use broadband Internet service, according to a report released Thursday by the Department of Commerce. That is 10 percent less than urban households. Over all, 28 percent of Americans do not use the Internet at all.

It took her three days to try to arrange a meeting with the governor 150 miles away in Montgomery because such inquiries cannot be made over the phone and she had to drive 45 minutes to her daughter’s house to use e-mail.

Today, Donny is in high school and a reader, Purcell-Gates said. To wonder what may have been the result if Jenny had not sought out Purcell-Gates, she points to a sobering statistic: a 78 percent drop out rate among urban Appalachians in many cities.

"One of the main conclusions in the book is that it is not just the presence of print for the child, it's the actual use of print that allows the learning to take place," she said. "Young children are paying attention to the people in their close circle or environment. They don't know in those very young ages that other people are reading and writing. To them, their world is what they experience where they live. And where the kids like Donny were living, no one read or wrote. So to them, reading and writing was not even something to reject. It didn't exist until they went to school.

"That is why it is so important to understand the worlds these children come from, so that you know what they are operating on.

A person can teach in one of Milwaukee's 125 publicly funded private schools without even a high school diploma.

"teacher proof"

Such approaches ignore fundamental issues of resources, teacher leadership, teaching and learning conditions, and the need for much more time for teachers to collaborate, assess student progress, and improve their teaching skills.

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses. “Did you see Babies?” asks Lois Nachamie, a couples counselor who for years has run parenting workshops and support groups on the Upper West Side. She’s referring to the recent documentary that compares the lives of four newborns—one in Japan, one in Namibia, one in Mongolia, and one in the United States (San Francisco). “I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.”