The 2008 National Year of Reading was a year-long celebration of reading, in all its forms. It aimed to help build a greater national passion for reading in England – for children, families and adult learners alike.
The Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, joined the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, children, writers, and reading champions at 10 Downing Street on 8 January 2008. He called for every employer, school, library, college and local authority to get involved.
Read more about 2008 National Year Of Reading: Purpose, Partners, Monthly Themes, Values, Legacy
Famous quotes containing the words national, year and/or reading:
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“But I must needs take my petulance, contrasting it with my accustomed morning hopefulness, as a sign of the ageing of appetite, of a decay in the very capacity of enjoyment. We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal which may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine- work which is so large a part of life.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)