ABSTRACT
Prominent educational discourse in the United States argues that changes in the economy demand deeper understanding of knowledge, greater flexibility of skills, and more interpersonal competencies for all students than even many of the elite achieved in the past. According to Basil Bernstein, invisible pedagogy, characterized by weak classification and framing, was institutionalized in the British infant schools by, and for, the "new middle class." In many publicly acknowledged ways, its curriculum and teaching embody features of invisible pedagogy. The dilemma can be set forth in the terms of Bernstein's analysis of visible and invisible pedagogies. Such recasting both generalizes the problem beyond its United States particulars and may help to explain why resolution, although worth struggling for, seems so hard to achieve. Reading Recovery can be considered a functional equivalent of a "preschool structure," providing young children with a "second site" for initial literacy learning in addition to their regular classrooms.
