ABSTRACT
Public concern about children's development of competence to read and write is an important social fact, but media and political responses to this concern are often very simple. Media reports, and the political policies in which they frequently result, often suggest that useful directions for literacy education policy are to be found in imaginary visions of learning and teaching which are located in the halcyon days of nobody's youth. As a result, public discussion of what is involved in learning to be literate as a child in the late twentieth century is often reduced to considering reincarnations of ideas which are more typical of the late nineteenth.
