Having helped train her dyslexic son to read, plus having studied dys-lexia scientifically, Wolf appears to be a strong believer in the power of teaching and learning. She contends that the demonstrable power of teach-ing alphabetic literacy can be applied to the challenge of information and media literacies:We must teach our children to be “bitextual” or “multitextual,” able to read and ana-lyze texts flexibly in different ways, with more deliberate instruction at every stage of development on the inferential, demanding aspects of any text. . . . My major conclusion from an examination of the developing reader is a cautionary one. I fear that many of our children are in danger of becoming just what Socrates warned us against—a society of decoders of information, whose false sense of knowing distracts them from a deeper development of their intellectual potential. It does not need to be so, if we teach them well, a charge that is equally applicable to our children with dyslexia.71Developing a pedagogy of attention is, I believe, the basis for Wolf’s kind of education.

Reading presented Socrates with a new version of Pandora’s box: once written language was released there could be no accounting for what would be written, who would read it, or how readers might interpret it.6

This plasticity at the heart of the brain’s design forms the basis for much of who we are, and we might become.

I reject this argument on the grounds that educating readers how to value good writing proved to be a better solution in the age of print than the rem-edy attempted by monarchies: licensing publishers.