ABSTRACT
This chapter is ultimately about reading, but it will take a while to get there. It first looks at how children acquire the concepts associated with words. This suggests a view of mind, meaning, and learning that stresses the situated and sociocultural nature of all of them and contains important implications for educational theory and practice. Then the chapter turns to the nature of reading, both in terms of textual types and content, arguing that the model of concept acquisition sketched earlier is also a model of reading. It briefly discusses the implications of this model in the context of debates over the death of the literary canon and proposals for critical or resistant reading. Massive social, cultural, economic, political, academic, and technological changes have all but led to the death of the canon and its associated cultural models and situated meanings. The literary canon represented the values, models, and situated meanings of the powerful in Western culture.
