ABSTRACT
This chapter examines schooling and the structuring and channelling of literacy. Using evidence drawn from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, it focuses upon three developments: the emergence of 'instruction' as a key activity in educational practice; the emergence of 'textbooks' as instruments of teaching and learning; and the emergence of curriculum thinking as an instrument for steering teaching and learning. Arguments about the shaping and reshaping of texts are included in Robert McLintock's analysis of teaching and learning. He characterizes Desiderius Erasmus, for instance, as the 'first tycoon of the text' and the 'exemplary editor of all time'. Erasmus, therefore, was a transposer as much as a transmitter of texts. Texts were gradually reorganized — particularly with regard to layout and typography — to conform with the exigencies of instruction rather than study. The harmonization of texts with the natural order of things was a major new development in the history of knowledge.
