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Is it possible that literacy standards are falling because young Australians are growing up in a culture in which they can be entertained and informed, and in which they can communicate effectively, without having to master any but the most rudimentary literacy skills?

Hugh Mackay
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It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.
Hugh Mackay
Some researchers sensibly suggest that rather than worrying too much about which programs our children are watching, we should concentrate on trying to reduce the total amount of time they spend in front of the screen.
Hugh Mackay
Perhaps it's the people whose lives have taken sudden new twists - people who have learned to embrace the creative possibilities of change - who stand the best chance of penetrating life's mysteries.
Hugh Mackay
Indeed, in the present climate of mistrust of institutions, many people who yearn for a more meaningful and fulfilling life would regard the church as an unlikely place to go for guidance.
Hugh Mackay
A strangely reflective, even melancholy day. Is that because, unlike our cousins in the northern hemisphere, Easter is not associated with the energy and vitality of spring but with the more subdued spirit of autumn?
Hugh Mackay
One reason we resist making deliberate choices is that choice equals change and most of us, feeling the world is unpredictable enough, try to minimise the trauma of change in our personal lives.
Hugh Mackay
Reading is a huge effort for many people, a bore for others, and, believe it or not, many people prefer watching TV.
Hugh Mackay
Parents should be encouraged to read to their children, and teachers should be equipped with all available techniques for teaching literacy, so the varying needs and capacities of individual kids can be taken into account.
Hugh Mackay
On average, Australians watch more than three hours of television a day, compared with 12 minutes a day spent by the average couple talking to each other.
Hugh Mackay
No one welcomes chaos, but why crave stability and predictability?
Hugh Mackay
Actually, I can't imagine anything more tedious than a perfect person, especially if it was someone who also demanded perfection from me.
Hugh Mackay
The copycat effects of media violence, similar to those previously attributed to westerns, radio serials and comic books, are easy to exaggerate.
Hugh Mackay
It's Australian to do such things because, however uncivilised they may seem, it's human to do them.
Hugh Mackay
I'm in total sympathy with Dick Smith's sentiments; I only wish there were grounds for saying we Australians would never tolerate such appalling treatment of refugees being carried out in our name.
Hugh Mackay
Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.
Hugh Mackay
The underlying message of the Lancet article is that if you want to understand aggressive behaviour in children, look to the social and emotional environment in which they are growing up, and the values they bring to the viewing experience.
Hugh Mackay
But the rule seems to be that the bigger and more life-changing the decision, the less it will seem like a decision at all.
Hugh Mackay
Is it possible that literacy standards are falling because young Australians are growing up in a culture in which they can be entertained and informed, and in which they can communicate effectively, without having to master any but the most rudimentary literacy skills?
Hugh Mackay
So, if falling crime rates coincide with the rise of violent video games and increasing violence on TV and at the cinema, should we conclude that media violence is causing the drop in crime rates?
Hugh Mackay
Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.
Hugh Mackay
Obviously, every child should be given the best possible opportunity to acquire literacy skills.
Hugh Mackay
Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.
Hugh Mackay
Although we love the idea of choice - our culture almost worships it - we seek refuge in the familiar and the comfortable.
Hugh Mackay
The question is, will we continue to fight what may be a rearguard action to defend universal literacy as a central goal of our education system, or are we bold enough to see what's actually happening to our culture?
Hugh Mackay
I wish we didn't have to own up to a policy deliberately designed to inflict suffering on people who have already been traumatised in the countries from which they've fled.
Hugh Mackay
Still, most of those effects occur in the context of harmless play and it is patently obvious that children are not normally turned into aggressive little monsters by TV or video games, since most children do not become aggressive little monsters.
Hugh Mackay
I suspect the secret of personal attraction is locked up in our unique imperfections, flaws and frailties.
Hugh Mackay
I suspect the secret of personal attraction is locked up in our unique imperfections flaws and frailties.
Hugh Mackay
I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.
Laurence Olivier
We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.
Vivienne Westwood
We need to have a culture that says 'the less energy you can use to be comfortable, the better off you are and the better you should feel about yourself'.
Roscoe Bartlett
Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.
Albert J. Nock
No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.
Christopher Dawson
The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.
Robert Wyatt
I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.
Paul Farmer
Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.
Compay Segundo
You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.
Andrew Greeley
Sex and drugs were simply not discussed in our culture at that time.
Gloria Estefan
You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.
Sonny Terry
Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.
Garry Trudeau
I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.
Norman Spinrad
Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.
Irvine Welsh
And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.
Martin Sheen
One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.
George Crumb
Mr. Speaker, genocide is the most potent of all crimes against humanity because it is an effort to systematically wipe out a people and a culture as well as individual lives.
Jerry Costello
When I go to Japan and do shows I play for 1,000 to 1,500 people. I like a lot about Japan. Their popular culture and mass commercialization appeals to me.
Matthew Sweet
The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.
Chen Ning Yang