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Suggesting that the United States' dominant form of literacy is contingent and historical, not permanent and absolute, this book asserts that when a society changes its definition of literacy, it also changes its models of mind and its models for teaching English. The book challenges the assumption that the public schools are a failure, arguing instead that public school teachers have met every literacy challenge put to them by parents and government. The book introduces a new standard of literacy ("translation/critical literacy"), and discusses how the new standard affects the English and language arts curriculum, the tools and methods of learning, and the conceptualization of assessment of knowledge. Chapters in the book are: (1) Shifting Social Needs: From Clocks to Thermostats; (2) From Oracy (or Face-to-Face Literacy) to Signature Literacy: 1660-1776; (3) Signature and Recording Literacy: 1776-1864; (4) Recitation and Report Literacy: 1864-1916; (5) A Literacy of Decoding, Defining, and Analyzing: 1916-1983; (6) The Transition to a New Standard of Literacy: 1960-1983; (7) The Event-Based Features of Translation/Critical Literacy; (8) Embodied Knowledge: Self-Fashioning and Agency; (9) Distributed Knowledge: The Technology of Translation/Critical Literacy; (10) Negotiated and Situated Knowledge: Translating among Sign Systems; (11) Negotiated and Situated Knowledge: Translating among Speech Events; (12) Negotiated, Situated, and Embodied Knowledge: Translating among the Modes; (13) Negotiated and Situated Knowledge: Translating between Stances; (14) Style and Worldviews in Literature and Public Discourse; and (15) Conclusion: "I Think It Happened Again." (RS)