Today's growing national concern about education centers on the paramount importance of teaching reading and writing. This volume offers a rigorous examination of reading and the pedagogy of reading critically. The book examines the crucial role of reading in the education of the child for the year 2000 and explores the history of reading and readers in America while surveying the attendant literacy debates. The author examines the historical progress of American reading instruction, demonstrating that how one is taught to read not only determines what one will read, but also what is permissible to read, and how pedagogies of reading define reading publics. An important chapter focuses on reading as a process of identity construction that creates not only a text but shapes the person who reads that text. The book also describes reading as a psychological process in which the creative act of manipulating the text produces the self and the world. A final chapter discusses reading as the center of the educational system and examines methodologies. An index is provided.