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Gunther Kress’s Before Writing (Routledge, £13.99, ISBN 0 415 13805 1)
is a call for a fundamental change in education. Provocatively, he defines
school as a place where teachers insist the world can only be known through the
abstractions of written language. His book shows, the fascinating ways in which
children express and exchange meaning on their progress to literacy. So he
argues that education should pay far more attention to such ingenuity, not least
because societies and technologies of the future will exploit many other methods
of communication than language.