You have the rest of your life to read Moby Dick , or Silas Marner or The Color Purple . Then you encounter these funny squiggles you' ve got to make sense out of the literacies. Because we can't read those books and listen to those works of art and understand those machines unless we pick up some of those literacies. But the literacies are not ends in themselves. President Clinton said we want to have every kid reading by third grade.
Literacies have to be a means to get to the disciplines.
The disciplines are the handmaidens to help us come up with reasonable first answers to all these essential questions. We can't do it on our own. But there are only three or four basic disciplines that we should worry about before college. One, how to think scientifically. They don't know what a hypothesis is.