Basic vaccination is important to protect children from infectious diseases and illnesses. Adequate levels of vaccination coverage reduce the morbidity and mortality burden among children and promote their physical and mental development. This study aimed to assess the association between basic childhood vaccination and the cognitive and learning ability of school children in India. Nationally representative follow-up data on 6183 children from the Indian Human Development Surveys conducted in 2004–05 and 2011–12 (IHDS I & II) were analysed. Children aged 8–10 years who had received all basic vaccines by the age 12 months performed better in a maths test than partially vaccinated or unvaccinated children (OR: 1.87, 95% CI: 1.48, 2.35). Similarly, fully vaccinated children performed better in writing tasks than partially vaccinated or unvaccinated children (OR: 1.77, 95% CI: 1.44, 2.18). Likewise, fully vaccinated children had better reading skills than fully unvaccinated children (OR: 1.60, 95% CI: 1.23, 2.09). The results suggest that enhancing child vaccination coverage can have significant benefits beyond health and can potentially improve the long-term educational outcomes of children.

Early Christianity is often regarded as an entirely lower-class phenomenon, and thus characterised by a low educational and cultural level. This view is false for several reasons. (1) When dealing with the ancient world, inferences cannot be made from the social class to which one belongs to one's educational and cultural level. (2) We may confidently state that in the early Christian urban congregations more than 50 per cent of the members could read and write at an acceptable level. (3) Socialisation within the early congregations occurred mainly through education and literature. No religious figure before (or after) Jesus Christ became so quickly and comprehensively the subject of written texts! (4) The early Christians emerged as a creative and thoughtful literary movement. They read the Old Testament in a new context, they created new literary genres (gospels) and reformed existing genres (the Pauline letters, miracle stories, parables). (5) From the very beginning, the amazing literary production of early Christianity was based on a historic strategy that both made history and wrote history. (6) Moreover, early Christians were largely bilingual, and able to accept sophisticated texts, read them with understanding, and pass them along to others. (7) Even in its early stages, those who joined the new Christian movement entered an educated world of language and thought. (8) We should thus presuppose a relatively high intellectual level in the early Christian congregations, for a comparison with Greco-Roman religion, local cults, the mystery religions, and the Caesar cult indicates that early Christianity was a religion with a very high literary production that included critical reflection and refraction.

Previous studies have shown a significant association between reading skills and the performance on visuo-motor tasks. In order to clarify whether reading and writing skills modulate non-linguistic domains, we investigated the performance of two literacy groups on a visuo-motor integration task with non-linguistic stimuli. Twenty-one illiterate participants and twenty matched literate controls were included in the experiment. Subjects were instructed to use the right or the left index finger to point to and touch a randomly presented target on the right or left side of a touch screen. The results showed that the literate subjects were significantly faster in detecting and touching targets on the left compared to the right side of the screen. In contrast, the presentation side did not affect the performance of the illiterate group. These results lend support to the idea that having acquired reading and writing skills, and thus a preferred left-to-right reading direction, influences visual scanning. (JINS, 2007, 13, 359–364.)