ABSTRACT
There is another metaphor for explaining the teaching and learning of reading and writing in Bourdieu’s (1990) early explorations of traditional systems of exchange. I want to reconsider reading and writing as gifts, and begin discussing the possibilities this might hold for explaining the education of those students who currently do not do well within state education systems. My argument is that many students who fail in early literacy are refusing a form of cultural exchange that is increasingly marked out as commodity exchange-an institutional exchange with costs and benefits from ostensive “buy in,” and rewards that often are inaccessible and invisible. This institutional exchange increasingly is dominated by corporate texts and legislated pedagogical scripts.
