"The authors steadily relate challenging theoretical issues to pedagogical issues of the most threatening kind: how to turn nonreaders into responsible, critical readers; how to deal with the overwhelming range of abilities and interests and cultural backgrounds of present-day students; how to move students from where they are to where the teacher is, without turning ‘where the teacher is’ into a dogmatic and destructively elitist platform. . . . Rabinowitz and Smith teach me just how many of my assumptions and practices have been questionable and how much I still have to learn about a challenging, immensely difficult profession that in my (dogmatic) view is unsurpassed in its importance."
—From the Foreword by Wayne C. Booth