이투스 리딩마스터 실전독해 7회 4번 분석노트
04 TEXT
Like scientists, literate human beings are made, not born. Like science, the ability to read is, most assuredly, not a maturationally natural cognitive skill. Is there any intellectual skill, other than science, that requires more practice? Learning to read and write calls not merely for years of hard work and tutelage but for the availability of materials to write on and to read. The extensive availability of both printed materials and systems of schooling continued over many years of a child’s life is a uniquely modern phenomenon, which to this day is confined primarily to the wealthiest half of the world’s nations. The principal reason that science has been so rare in human history is that the unnatural cognitive accomplishment on which it depends, literacy, has itself been so rare in human history. Most cultures did not develop a system of writing and only a fraction of those that even adopted one have produced a substantial corpus.