Shows why reading and writing are essential to developing a consciousness of language that, in turn, lies at the core of rationality.

David R. Olson is University Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. He is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 300 articles on cognition, language and literacy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the National Academy of Education (US), and has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Gothenburg, the University of Saskatchewan, and the University of Toronto.

Preface; Part I. Introduction: Reading, Writing and the Mind; 1. Awakening: reading and consciousness; Part II. Theories of the Relation between Writing and Mind: 2. Inventing writing: the history of writing and the ontogeny of writing; 3. Dewey and the New Pragmatists: reading, writing and mind; 4. Vygotsky and the Vygotskians; 5. The cognitive science of metarepresentation; Part III. Reading and the Invention of Language about Language: 6. Phonemes and the alphabet; 7. The discovery of words and thinking about words; 8. Sentences and logic; 9. Prose and rational argument; 10. The testing of rationality and the rationality of testing; Part IV. The Implications and Uses of Metarepresentational Language: 11. The psychology and pedagogy of reading; 12. The psychology and pedagogy of rationality; Part V. Conclusions: 13. Reading, consciousness and rationality; References; Author index; Subject index.