After reading Chapter 2, a lot of things were important but just the statement: "Think of literacy as a spine; it hold everything together."  How true is that.  Without the skill of reading and understanding our complex language, our spine is flawed.  We have to crawl before we walk and if students miss out on important foundations in literacy, how difficult is it to get them where they need to be?  I think all of us have seen the results of a student missing the important components of reading and the long road to get them repaired.  I just thought that it was an interesting analogy of literacy.