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Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it. This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. And it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. Amanda Kordeliski, who is on the board of the American Association of School Librarians, told me that she and her fellow librarians have had to buy new books to accommodate students’ diminished reading levels. Some of the most popular are graphic novels: updated classics such as the Magic Tree House series for elementary-school students, and manga for middle and high schoolers.In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent. And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate. Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice. Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.” From the November 2024 issue: Rose Horowitch on the elite college students who can’t read books It may seem self-serving for a writer at a 169-year-old magazine to carry a torch for reading. But the people who make a living from words are not the only ones who lose out in a postliterate age. Reading is more than a skill, or one mode of communication among many. The media we use to interact with one another shape the world we inhabit. Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun. Reading has never been natural. Humans have no innate cognitive machinery designed to string letters into words and connect them to their real-world analogues. To read, people had to repurpose regions of their brain used for speech and object recognition. The practice first emerged 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. For millennia afterward, most of the population was illiterate. Literacy became a mass phenomenon relatively recently, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440. The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for newmeaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries. “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” Walter J. Ong, a historian and Jesuit priest, wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy. He argued that literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought. Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words. Later scholars would attribute some of these new modes of thinking to other aspects of living in a literate society, not to reading alone. But Ong’s larger argument stands: Print cultures value lengthy, organized arguments. “Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist—all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading,” Neil Postman wrote in 1985. The advent of reading and writing was a precondition for philosophy, modern science, history as an academic enterprise, art criticism. These changes were hugely destabilizing. As literacy spread through societies, it contributed to political upheaval and revolutions. In the American colonies, the leaders of the patriot cause employed newspapers and pamphlets to foment anti-British sentiment. “The ancient Roman and Greek Orators could only speak to the Number of Citizens capable of being assembled within the Reach of Their Voice,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1782. “Now by the Press we can speak to Nations; and good Books & well written Pamphlets have great and general Influence.” America’s Founders used a print document to construct their new nation and believed that the system they had devised would work precisely because citizens would be informed readers. Franklin was himself a newspaper publisher and established America’s first lending library. “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans,” he wrote in his autobiography, and “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” Early on, Americans came to see staying informed as a civic and even moral imperative. Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Nor was access to reading evenly distributed. For a long time, large numbers of Americans couldn’t pass the federal government’s literacy test—especially in the South, where preventing Black literacy was a pillar of white-supremacist government. But from the beginning, literature was a crucial source of entertainment, meaning, and connection for many Americans. They shared a set of references from the Bible and English literature. Charles Dickens was sufficiently beloved by American readers that when he got his hair cut during a visit to New York City in 1842, admirers flocked to collect clippings from the barber. In the 19th century, composing a letter was an art form, and even correspondence with loved ones was written in an elegant, formal style. “It’s weird for us to see it now: a Civil War soldier writing to his wife, and he’s covered with mud in this tent, and he writes as if he’s Shakespeare,” John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, told me. “And you think, Can’t he loosen up with his own wife? But the thing is, that is him basically sending her roses.” Samuel D. Lougheed served in the 8th Regiment of the Union’s Missouri Volunteer Infantry, which fought at Shiloh and the Siege of Vicksburg. In October 1862, he wrote to his wife: “Tis hard to lie down covered with your own gore on a battle field and die. Tis hard to see the mighty prancing war horse, trampling the dying and dead beneath their merciless feet. No dear wife, near to speak a word of comfort. No living sister or Mother to administer relief in that hour the most sad in the history of humanity. O the humanity. O the horrors of war.” In 1962, marshall mcluhan, the patron saint of media theorists, predicted that the Western world would become what he called “post-literate.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy, published that year, he suggested that such an age had already begun—that electronic media were already supplanting the written word. At the time, 90 percent of homes had a television, compared with 9 percent only a decade earlier. Television was becoming Americans’ main source of news. The average household spent more than five hours a day in front of the TV set. Viewed from the present, the America of the 1950s and ’60s doesn’t seem postliterate. After the war, the nation had become wealthier and more highly educated at a remarkable pace. Its appetite for the written word and its veneration of the intellectuals who produced it seemed poised to grow and grow. In 1964, Time, which then had a circulation of more than 3 million, ran a cover story on John Cheever, the author known for his dark fables of suburban malaise. The article, “Ovid in Ossining,” opened with an extended quotation from the invocation of Metamorphoses. In Cheever’s famous story “The Five-Forty-Eight,” the protagonist boards the titular train and is greeted by a then-familiar, now-exotic sight: a car full of commuters reading the evening newspaper. But television was changing the rhythms and habits of American life. In 1985, Postman, a friend and disciple of McLuhan’s, published Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that television had hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment. “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,” Postman wrote. “Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.” At the time, the average American household watched more than seven hours of television every day, a number that would rise to nearly nine hours by 2010. If TV crowded out the silent time necessary for reading, broadband internet and the smartphone make it nearly impossible. Not too long ago, at-home screen entertainment was finite. Shows aired on a certain day, at a certain time. If you wanted to watch an old movie, you had to put your shoes on and go to a video store. Books could compete in that environment. Some people, at least, would turn off the TV and read a book before falling asleep. Now entertainment is limitless. There’s no hard stop—one show bleeds into the next. People watch TV with their phone in hand, monitoring social media or texting with friends. Netflix has reportedly told directors and screenwriters to assume that the audience isn’t paying attention and to constantly remind viewers what’s going on. In this environment, people have to be really determined to read. Most aren’t. When people do read, they might find that they’re absorbing less information. That’s especially true if they read on their phone. The endless scroll, hyperlinks, and notifications invite surface-level reading, with constant invitations to look elsewhere. Studies have shown that people comprehend less when reading on a digital device than on paper, perhaps because of all these distractions. Devoting extended, undivided attention to a text can now feel like too much to ask. Audiobooks have become a popular alternative to print books at least in part because listening to a book allows for multitasking: You can read while doing the dishes or driving to work. Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year. Successive waves of education reforms have led districts to favor short passages over full books, the better to mimic multiple-choice reading-comprehension exams. Many of the most popular school curricula now rely on excerpts. Annemarie Cortez, the principal at an elementary school in Corona, California, told me that many administrators are instructing teachers not to assign full books; they’re supposed to be running discrete reading drills with short excerpts. Annemarie Cortez, the principal at an elementary school in Corona, California, told me that many administrators are instructing teachers not to assign full books; they’re supposed to be running discrete reading drills with short excerpts. Meanwhile, digital devices have flooded American classrooms. In a New York Times survey, more than 80 percent of elementary-school teachers said students receive a school-issued device by the time they enter kindergarten. Lupita Villalobos, who teaches 3-year-olds at a pre-K in Duncanville, Texas, told me that the district gives each student a tablet to use during school. She’s prevented her students from using the devices, as she knows how much time they spend on them at home. “I had a student who had a very strong reaction to starting school,” she said. “Typically, students cry maybe the first couple weeks and say they want their mom. But this student would cry for her tablet.” In the recent past, people were at least reading something online, but that’s changing fast. Social media, once mainly text-based, has been overrun with short-form videos. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels dominate the attention economy, especially among young people. According to a recent data analysis by Jean Twenge, a psychology professor who studies generational change, by eighth grade, the average kid spends four and a half hours a day on social media. For much of that time, it appears, they are watching videos, often at 2x speed. Even text messages have taken on characteristics of the spoken word. People use all caps to indicate heightened emotion and avoid the formality of proper punctuation, which now seems stilted, even stern. Like many 20-somethings, my friends and I have mostly moved on from texts, preferring to send one another voice recordings instead. The written word has survived for thousands of years and overcome successive challenges from new technologies. It’s clearly resilient. Reading rates might fluctuate, but optimists argue that the long arc of history points toward universal literacy. Martin Puchner, a comparative-literature professor at Harvard, studies how literature has shaped history. He’s spent decades tracing how communication technologies have changed, and the panics those changes ave triggered. For much of his career, he was skeptical of fears about the end of reading. “If the long history of changes in writing technologies has taught me anything, I think it’s that one should always resist the kind of doomsday scenarios,” he told me. And yet, even Puchner now believes that the doomsday scenario has arrived: A return to text, away from video, seems awfully unlikely. Maybe McLuhan and Postman weren’t wrong in predicting that our society would become postliterate. They were merely early. The world that these theorists foresaw half a century ago is now here. The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages. Reading shaped the modern mind. Its disappearance will reshape it. Cognitive scientists are starting to understand what these changes might look like. I asked a dozen of them what happens to our brains when we stop reading. Several were amused by my rudimentary question. “Everything that happens to you changes the brain,” Dan Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia, told me. “Literally reading a word changes your brain for a few hours at least—and, if you know how to measure it right, for much longer than that.” He was trying to reassure me: If everything changes the brain, then almost no single action matters all that much. But what if you consistently replace one kind of action (reading a word) with another (watching an Instagram Reel)? One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is that people’s brains master what they practice. If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair. Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge. Social media offers instant gratification. John Hutton, a pediatrics professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, compares scrolling TikTok to a lab rat pushing a button and getting a dose of cocaine: Eventually, all you want to do is push the button. In 2004, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes, Gloria Mark, a psychologist at UC Irvine, told me. By 2012, it had dropped to 75 seconds. Five years ago, it fell to about 47 seconds. “We become accustomed to having content change rapidly,” Mark said. Watching videos is a more passive form of engagement than reading. Hutton recently collected brain images of children, all 3 to 5 years old, as they took in stories in different formats. When children watched an animated video of a story, they used the region of the brain associated with imagination about half as much as they did when looking at static illustrations while listening to an audio recording. Children also used their cerebellum—a part of the brain associated with learning—less when watching a video. “They don’t really have to use their imagination as much, because things are happening on the screen,” Hutton told me. “The brain’s just doing less work to understand and learn from what they’re seeing in the animated, compared to the illustrated.” The paradox is that although video contains more information than text—not just language but sounds and moving images—it does not stimulate deeper thinking. To the contrary, video thrusts so much information at the viewer at once that it’s difficult to focus on any one piece of it. The frames keep changing regardless of how much the viewer has noticed or comprehended. Few people pause and rewind to reflect on what they might have missed. Young people today have never experienced a world without ubiquitous short-form video. In other studies, Hutton found that children who had more screen time and spent less time reading had less well-developed white matter in areas associated with executive function and language. This suggests that they were less accustomed to using those skills. Benjamin Powers, at the Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me that students arrive in elementary school with a poor ability to maintain focus and a low tolerance for mental exertion. “In classrooms, this shows up as students who can decode or retrieve information but struggle with comprehension that requires inference, synthesis, or holding ideas in mind across longer texts,” he said. In a 2024 survey of third-to-eighth-grade teachers, more than 80 percent said that their students’ reading stamina had declined since 2019. Scores on the ACT’s reading and English sections have been falling for the past seven years. They’re now at their lowest level in more than three decades. SAT reading and writing scores have declined too, even as administrators have shortened and simplified the passages assessing reading-comprehension skills. When these students get to college, their professors find that they have to teach them how to comprehend a text—in other words, how to think. “I’m teaching in German, so we’ve always been used to teaching them how to read, which is something that people in English departments are now realizing that they have to do,” Jonathan Fine, a German-studies professor at Brown University, told me. “Before you can even get to ‘What’s the larger point?,’ it’s: ‘Is this ironic?,’ what a metaphor might mean, just trying to get the very words and grammar to get them to notice everything, so that they can hopefully then make the larger connections.” That may sound like an exaggeration, but higher education will almost certainly have to become more remedial. In a study of English and English-education majors at two regional universities in Kansas, published in 2024, researchers asked students to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. The novel follows members of the Jarndyce family through a lengthy legal dispute over their inheritance. It begins: London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. Dickens continues by describing the Lord Chancellor as he is “addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief.” Another student interpreted this passage as “describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?” hat students would struggle with unfamiliar references is not surprising. But the researchers gave them access to the entire internet. They could have looked up Michaelmas term or Lord Chancellor or Lincoln’s Inn Hall if they had chosen to do so. Students didn’t even know how to go about figuring out what they didn’t understand, or they didn’t bother. Most of them did not realize that the passage takes place in a court of law. Only 5 percent had an accurate, detailed understanding of what they’d read. These changes aren’t confined to college campuses. American adults’ ability to answer logic questions, reason effectively, and analyze patterns declined from 2006 to 2018. American adults also tend to have a smaller vocabulary than those with an equivalent level of education did half a century ago. Recent studies suggest that the Flynn effect—the steady rise in IQ between generations since the 1930s—has reversed over the past two decades. Average IQ scores are declining by about three points a decade, Elizabeth Dworak, a research psychologist at Northwestern’s medical school, told me. The cognitive shifts aren’t all negative. Dworak’s research finds that American adults are improving in certain forms of spatial reasoning. Postliterate culture could convey advantages that we don’t yet understand. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates famously argues that the advent of writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” He was right. But as writing eroded individuals’ memories, the media theorist Andrey Mir has observed, it improved society’s collective memory. Could the generations growing up with their brains hooked to endless video feeds be developing some kind of novel, as-yet-undetectable cognitive brilliance? Perhaps. But for now, the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking. It’s difficult to see any advantages in that. In 1982, walter j. ong observed that modern civilization was entering a phase of “secondary orality,” in which a once-literate society reverts back to some of the conventions of preliterate cultures. Because spoken words disappear as soon as they’re uttered, oral cultures value repetition to aid memory. Bards in oral societies make use of stock phrases and mnemonics to keep track of their train of thought. They traffic in epithets and “enthusiastic description of physical violence,” in Ong’s words, because conflict is more memorable than dispassionate discussion. Speakers can’t edit their words the way writers can, so they press on without admitting their mistakes. If they later contradict themselves, they don’t expect the audience to recall their earlier statements. Meaning depends on the identity of the speaker, not on any concept of objective truth. It is unlikely that Donald Trump has familiarized himself with Orality and Literacy. But if he did, he might recognize himself in Ong’s description. Trump’s communication style is perfectly suited to an oral society. He employs epithets—“Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Sleepy Joe”—that are easy to remember and repeat. He contradicts himself as though there is no record of his previous statements. Even his writing is almost indistinguishable from his speech. (It makes sense; Trump reportedly prefers dictation to composition.) His online posts are full of idiosyncratically placed punctuation, capital letters, and exclamation points. Many are memes with little text: One featured an image of an American warship hitting an Iranian airplane with a laser beam and included the phrase “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!” Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found hat Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age. “So many people, particularly in the academic and journalistic circles, think of him as a political revolutionary,” Roderick Hart, a communications professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “And I see him much more as a rhetorical revolutionary.” In the 1985 book No Sense of Place, the media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz observed that television and other electronic media inundated Americans with new kinds of information about their prospective leaders. Print media gave the public access only to politicians’ polished remarks; video let Americans see their presidents sweat, sneeze, and stammer. Voters began to focus on “dating criteria” instead of “résumé criteria,” he told me. “More than in the past, authorities today must often ‘look and sound good’ rather than write and reason well,” Meyrowitz wrote in No Sense of Place. He predicted that the decline of print and rise of electronic media would ultimately push people toward populist leaders. They would shun authority and institutions in favor of the candidate who made good television. He published his book soon after Ronald Reagan, a former actor, had won reelection. “I reread the book recently and I kept going, Holy shit, this is even more true than when I wrote it,” Meyrowitz said. Social-media platforms give Americans unprecedented opportunities to watch their representatives’ every move. Their algorithms reward simplistic, inflammatory, emotionally resonant content over complexity, nuance, and rigor. Ideas that comport with folk theories of politics—all leaders are equally corrupt ; immigrants steal jobs; policy problems have easy, commonsense solutions—prevail over the findings of subject-matter experts. Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me how this plays out. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.” Politicians who promote the distrust of institutions and elites do better under such circumstances. “You create this fantasy that, actually, it’s all really, really simple, and one charismatic person can just achieve these wins that are visually compelling and emotionally compelling,” Salam said. This is precisely the kind of demagogic figure the Founders hoped a well-read populace would see through. “When you think about our constitutional order, how it was meant to work, it absolutely cuts against that,” Salam said. Marshall McLuhan once said, “The liberal world by definition is literate.” The inverse appears to be true as well. If Trump is the first postliterate president, he won’t be the last. The political strategist David Plouffe, an architect of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, recently argued that candidates should focus each day on content creation. He advised shrinking every idea into something short enough for screen-addled voters to concentrate on. “If it can’t be communicated in an Instagram post or 10-second TikTok, go back to the drawing board,” Plouffe wrote in a New York Times op-ed. That may very well be good advice on how to campaign for office in the postliterate era. As a way to practice informed self-government, it portends disaster. I formalize inchoate ideas and gain new understanding. By evaluating my arguments and discarding those that aren’t convincing, I find the ones that are. Writing is hard because the writer is learning. If AI eliminates the challenge, it also eliminates the learning. Early studies have suggested that this is exactly what happens when people use AI to write. The process is easier. The product is often better than what someone could compose on their own. But it comes at the expense of mental development. One study in Brazil determined that undergraduates who used AI for studying performed significantly worse on a surprise test than those who studied without AI. The students trailed their peers even on questions that demanded reflection and effort instead of specific knowledge. Another study of hundreds of individuals in Britain found that frequent AI use for cognitive tasks is negatively associated with critical-thinking abilities. I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence yet. A number of digital technologies have hijacked attention and made focused reading all but impossible. Generative AI is the first tool to threaten the continued existence of writing. Writing is hard. Orwell likened the experience to a “long bout of some painful illness.” AI promises a simple remedy. The trouble is that writing is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard. Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them. Cal Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University, argues that the process of writing forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion. It exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights. This feels true to me. My job is to write. With apologies to Orwell, the prospect of a painful illness fills me with less dread than a blank page. But there’s satisfaction in the struggle. The writing process is how I refine and formalize inchoate ideas and gain new understanding. By evaluating my arguments and discarding those that aren’t convincing, I find the ones that are. Writing is hard because the writer is learning. If AI eliminates the challenge, it also eliminates the learning. Early studies have suggested that this is exactly what happens when people use AI to write. The process is easier. The product is often better than what someone could compose on their own. But it comes at the expense of mental development. One study in Brazil determined that undergraduates who used AI for studying performed significantly worse on a surprise test than those who studied without AI. The students trailed their peers even on questions that demanded reflection and effort instead of specific knowledge. Another study of hundreds of individuals in Britain found that frequent AI use for cognitive tasks is negatively associated with critical-thinking abilities. Modern life demands a lot of tedious writing. Some of it can surely be offloaded to machines without too great a cost. But a career spent studying the historical adoption of new technologies has convinced Newport that it’s almost impossible to automate away one problem without creating others. Over and over, people think they’re using a tool to bypass a single tiresome task. “And then there’s all these unexpected second-order impacts,” he told me. Email was supposed to be a more convenient substitute for faxes, phone calls, and meetings. Instead, responding to emails became an immense time suck of its own. These unforeseen consequences end up transforming intellectual life. The skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing. It will also become more and more important. AI is creating a superabundance of text. It has led to a threefold increase in the number of books released on Amazon each month since 2022, when ChatGPT was launched. Over the same period, scientific-journal submissions have also surged. Many were written at least in part by artificial intelligence. AI produces crisp, professional prose. Presented with human- and AI-produced text side by side, even M.F.A. candidates have been shown to prefer the work of the machines. If AI writing is pleasing and convincing, however, it is also unoriginal, often inaccurate, or both. People will therefore need their powers of discernment and comprehension more than ever. They will need to know what they think and how to make their own judgments. These are the exact skills that the use of AI threatens to erode. What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities. “If we gave those up,” the NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah told me, “we’d stop being the kind of humans that we are. We’d be very different creatures.” by Arthur Reed Kimball describing “one of the most serious of the unchallenged changes of modern American life.” The ability of the nation’s citizens to write well and think deeply was under attack. The enemy of eloquence and sustained attention? The newspaper. In “The Invasion of Journalism,” Kimball argued that the daily paper, with its sports pages and gossip columns, its miscellaneous items and slang, was eclipsing the book and the literary magazine. Even those who claim to read the newspaper to learn of pressing events in Washington or Europe, he argued, will turn first “to some interesting ‘story,’ perhaps a curious bicycle adventure, perhaps the capture of a clever burglar.” From the July 1900 issue: The invasion of journalism Before the newspaper, the novel was seen as a threat to good reading habits and moral stature. Thomas Jefferson thought that one of the greatest obstacles to educating women was their passion for fiction, which seduced them away from “wholesome reading.” Once a woman has fallen for novels, he wrote, “nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy.” Those inclined to dismiss the present assault on reading point to this venerable tradition: decrying some new technology or medium as distracting and debasing the American people. Perhaps, 126 years from now, this essay will seem like the latest such exercise in hand-wringing. Looking back at these laments, I noticed that the people most invested in the old modes are usually the quickest to predict that all will be lost. By some measures at least, books continue to thrive. Last year, print-book sales were higher than they were a decade ago. Barnes & Noble opened more than 60 new stores. Almost 400 independent bookstores sprang up in 2025. Substack has seen an explosion of subscriptions for long-form writing. Celebrities such as Dua Lipa and Reese Witherspoon have used their fame and influence to launch wildly successful book clubs. Audiobooks have become a billion-dollar industry. But the optimists overlook a crucial thread in the data: Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me. Readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it. Now that being a reader is optional, it can function as an identity marker. When you see someone on the train reading printed matter, it feels like a statement. Perhaps inevitably, such statements have become the stuff of online ridicule: Brandish a book too ostentatiously in public, and you might find yourself accused of “performative reading.” The label presumes the person is only trying to telegraph that they are highly educated or possess superior literary taste—why else would they lug a book around? We’ve been here before. When society first transitioned from orality to literacy, only a small minority could read. As the only individuals who possessed this valuable skill, they occupied a privileged position, and were paid handsomely for their work. At the Library of Alexandria, scholars in residence lived in the city’s royal complex. Today, reading is again clustered among a small minority of the population, but being a person of letters confers less status than it once did. The remaining readers are marginalized, mocked, and in many ways irrelevant. For most people, a life of letters is an economic dead end. Employment at newspapers has fallen by 75 percent in the past two decades. Job openings for academics in the humanities are likewise in decline, and fewer and fewer of the remaining positions are tenure-track. In 2024, only 8 percent of college graduates earned a bachelor’s degree in a humanities discipline. That year, both English and history departments awarded 40 percent fewer degrees than they did in 2012. There’s a fear among historians, whispered during panels and conferences, that they will be the final generation to systematically examine the past. The notion of a popular literary figure appearing on the cover of a print newsweekly read by millions of Americans is impossible to imagine today. There is no such figure, and there are no such widely read newsweeklies. Instead, many Americans are proudly postliterate. The president has spoken about his taste for bullet-pointed briefings, and aides have said he likes pictures and charts. The world’s richest men brag about getting their information from X posts, podcasts, and conversations with chatbots. Young people who seek wealth and influence are encouraged to mimic them. Cultural and economic power tends to flow to people who are skilled at using the most popular communications technology. Today, those people are streamers, podcasters, and influencers. Joe Rogan commands the kind of audience that journalists could only dream of. He has more than 14 million followers on Spotify and more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube. MrBeast, a YouTuber who stages elaborate stunts, such as a real-life Squid Game, regularly gets hundreds of millions of views. Video-game streamers such as IShowSpeed and TheBurntPeanut are among the most popular media figures in the country. These personalities shape what young people aspire to and talk about, and even how they speak. Books used to be an essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality. They were written by older generations and passed down to the young in a vertical transmission of culture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me. Now information moves horizontally, from young person to young person. This dynamic makes figures such as MrBeast and TheBurntPeanut the guardians of American culture. The decline of reading didn’t turn the world upside down. It turned the world sideways. Young people want to pursue jobs that will catapult them into the elite—which today means that people coming of age want to be influencers. A 2023 Morning Consult poll found that almost 60 percent of Gen Z respondents said they would be a social-media personality if they could. Amanda Kordeliski, of the American Association of School Librarians, is also a librarian in Oklahoma, where she has set up recording studios for students. “Podcasting is the hottest, most popular thing. I could buy a million microphones and there would still be a waitlist to get into the audio labs,” she told me. “Everybody wants to be an influencer.” In September, Syracuse University launched its Center for the Creator Economy, and will soon offer its inaugural minor for aspiring influencers. “This center speaks directly to the aspirations of current and prospective students,” Mark J. Lodato, the dean of the university’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, said in a press release. “It’s about meeting them where they are—and preparing them to lead in the world that’s coming.” The arrival of that world isn’t yet a certainty. Some people have noticed what we’re giving up, and they’re choosing a different path. Nearly two dozen states have banned cellphones during the school day. After Texas’s ban went into effect at the start of this past academic year, a Dallas school district saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before, a nearly 25 percent increase. Rex Ovalle, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburbs and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, told me he’s seen pushback against excerpts; some teachers are adding whole books back into their curriculum. Felton Thomas Jr., the executive director of the Cleveland Public Library, said that its youngest patrons have joined senior citizens in preferring print books to digital copies. If these acts of defiance against a postliterate culture seem futile, the holdouts lose nothing by trying. I was raised in the postliterate era. I was born shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released. In seventh grade, I got my first phone and promptly made an Instagram account. If you make an internet reference—any internet reference—I will (regrettably) almost always get it. Most of my knowledge of a world premised on reading comes from what I’ve read in books. I had the advantage of growing up in a family of readers. My dad read to me almost every night, all the way through middle school. (As the father of a moody daughter, he often didn’t know what words to say to me. When we read together, he could borrow someone else’s.) My older sisters couldn’t wait to recruit me into their book club. Our favorite was The Boxcar Children, about four orphaned siblings who create a home in an abandoned train car. In the book, the children have scarcely found food and shelter before the two sisters decide to teach their younger brother to read. They carve wood chips into letters and use blackberry juice for ink. When I turned 10, my mom passed down her childhood copies of Rabbit Hill and Johnny Tremain. She had written her signature on the inside cover when she got them. I added my own. During high school, I got it in my head that I should read the classics. My teachers kept recommending their favorite books. I wanted to share in their knowledge and understand their references. I slogged through Jane Eyre and fell for Anna Karenina. Although I was alone while reading, I didn’t feel that way. These books contained the wisdom of generations. As James Baldwin said (in a 1963 Life profile, just a week after he appeared on the cover of Time): “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.” I felt like I was part of an unbroken chain of knowledge and culture. In the years since—I’m not quite sure when—the habit slipped. The change was subtle. I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading. My attention began to wander every few pages. What did it matter if I read less? No one was checking on my progress. And the books would always be there. I could pick them up later. When the Library of Alexandria disappeared, the knowledge inscribed on its scrolls was lost forever. We can only guess what else Eratosthenes and Euclid might have written. The text turned to dust. That won’t happen today; all of the words in the great library could be stored on a single computer chip. Nowadays, even the most obscure academic monographs are scanned and digitized. Google Books and the Internet Archive represent libraries of unfathomable proportions. We can navigate to them with a few keystrokes, not a perilous journey across the Mediterranean. There’s little risk of their texts succumbing to humidity or mice. But the threat of apathy remains. What we’re losing is the ability and inclination to read those texts. An astonishing wealth of information and wisdom has been bequeathed to us. What we’ll do with this inheritance is up to us. his article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Age of Reading Is Over.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Destinos da leitura

Copio aqui artigo publicado na Atlantic. SKIP TO CONTENTSite Navigation THE END OF READING IS HERE Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history. By Rose Horowitch The Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. His successors inherited this mandate. Royal forces ransacked every ship that arrived at Alexandria, searching for scrolls. These were stored at the Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum. Aristotle’s own book collection was said to be among the holdings. Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well. This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong. Traditionally, the answer was believed to be war. During the Siege of Alexandria, in 48 B.C.E., Julius Caesar started a fire that incinerated at least 40,000 scrolls. The library survived in diminished form until the fourth century C.E., when followers of the archbishop of Alexandria sacked the pagan temple that housed the remaining manuscripts. But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence. Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived. Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. he decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse. The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature. In 1958, the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, according to Publishers Weekly. Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.” Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults. (Other titles in the top 10 include the children’s books Partypooper, the 20th installment in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and Dog Man: Big Jim Believes.) The most popular novel written for adults was the romantasy adventure Onyx Storm. Whatever the book’s pleasures, it isn’t Pasternak: “A muscle in his square jaw ticks as he stares down at me, rippling the tawny-brown skin of his stubbled cheek.”

OS BLOGS NÃO MORRERTAM 2

Como disse em post passado, os blogs são hoje espécie ameaçada. Tiveram uma época de esplendor, de 2002 a 2010, e começaram a fenecer por volta de 2015. Em muitos casos, os blogs foram simplesmente abandonados. A blogolândia converteu-se numa cidade fantasma. Outros autores encerraram atividades e tiraram suas produções do ar. Este foi o caso de blogs de dois amigos, Bernie Dodge e David Carraher. Ambos produziam posts curtos, mas muito informativos. Eram exemplos de como blogar, sugerindo temas para dialogar com os leitores, não textões acadêmicos. Além disso, falavam eventualmente de casos pessoais. Os blogs de Bernie e David eram botecos vituais.

Havia autores que usavam seus blogs para publicar textos que caberiam num periódico. Eram escritos longos que antecipavam artigos em journals ou até substituiam a publicação em revistas. Blogs assim permaceram no ar ou até foram criados após a blogolândia perder a maios parte de seu habitantes. Vários de tais blogs merecem atenção, pois apresentam matérias de interesse para muita gente. Vou falar de alguns deles num post vindouro.

Volver a los 17

Foto minha aos 17 foi tratada por meu irmão Luiz com recursos de IA. Ao vê-la, lembrei-me da canção famosa de Violeta Parra. Se pudesse, gostaria muito de voltar aos 17.

Os blogs não morreram

Certa vez escrevi lá no Boteco Escola que os blogs morreram. Errei. Na verdade, morerram os blogs que fizeram furor na Blogolâncdia nos inícios dos anos 2000. Há, sim, um imenso cemitério blogal na internet, com um número grande de insepultos. Há blogs que morerram e foram enterrados decentemente. Mas, o que predomina são blogs cujos autores os esqueceram e não tiveram o cuidado de construir um túmulo decente para suas criaturas. Confesso que sou um destes. Abandonei uns três ou quatro blogs pelo caminho. Para mim morerram, mas continuam a ocupar espaço na Blogosfera.Acho que o cemitério blogal foi aberto por volta de 2014. Até então os blogs tinham muita vitalidade, eram uma das maiores atrações da internet. Com o surgimento de outras atrações do mundo digital, Twiter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, os autores de blogs deixaram suas obras de lado e começaram a curtir as novidades. Além disso, abandou-se o costume de comentar posts de blogs. Se alguém os lê, fica quieto, não entra na conversa. Os blogs deixaram de ser um espaço parecido com os velhos cafés parisienses, locais de papos sem censura. A freguesia dos blogs migrou para outras plagas onde, geralmente, os textos são mais curtos. Ãs vezes há comentários no Facebook, mas são breves. Não são elemnetos de uma conversa no velho estilo das prosas em cafés ou botecos.

Como disse no título, os blogs não morerram. Muitos foram para o cemitério, mas outros sobreviveram. No próximo post falarei dos sobreviventes e nas novas criaturas blogais.

Parágrafo ainda

Voltei ao Aprendente e na edição estou apanhando do paragrafar. Com tando tempo sem editar, perdi pistas na produção de textos. E a coisa não termina. Continua na mesma linha. Seá que é assim maesmo? Dou no esticada para saber onde a coisa vai.

aaa

Tá...

Como paragrafar

Voltei ao Aprendente. Estou com algumas dificuldades para produzir textos com o layout que quero. Uma das coisas que está me atrapalhando é paragrafar. Uso as formas convencionais e tenho resultado indesejados. mas deve ter algum pulo do gato para conseguir o que quero. Há que ver...

Inovação em EPT

Semana passada participei de conversa de grupo que está preparando um evento sobre inovação em Educação Profissional e Tecnológica. Ao apresentarem o tema, falaram sobre atuação do professor em sala de aula. Fiquei a ouvir. Todos os cenários que eram apresentados referiam-se à educação escolar, referiam-se àquilo que minha amiga Liv Mejlede chama de "educação letrada". Vale observar que a educação letrada é oferecida para as elites e não tem qualquer vinculação com o trabalho. Liv mostra que as origens da educação para o trabalho não é letrada, é voltada para a execucão (para a obra, como gosto de dizer). Por isso, o local mais adequado para a formação profissional não é a sala de aula, é a oficina. Quando falei, disse que gostaria que uma das organizações de EPT que bem conheço, o SENAC, apresentasse como inovadora a educação que acontece na cozinha do Grande Hotel São Pedro. Os alunos trabalham por períodos nos diversos setores da cozinha: garde manger, açougue, confeitaria, cozinha quente. Engajam-se nas tarefas demandadas pelo trabalho concreto na cozinha, não seguem um percurso previamente determnado por conveniências pedagógicas. Simplesmente trabalham. E assim aprendem. Os educadores não conseguem perceber que o que acontece na cozinha do GHSP tem tudo a ver com os atuais estudos sobre psicologia cognitiva (cf Sylvia Scribner, p. e.) e abordagem social do trabalho (cf. Lave e Wenger, p. e.). Embora saiba que o que rola na cozinha do hotel escola não merecerá atenção dos educadores que falam em inovação em EPT, lancei um desafio: apresentar o que acontece nos setores da cozinha, no açougue por exedmplo, como a forma mais avançada de aprender a trabalhar. Há muito o que dizer sobre o tema. Paro por aqui, pois quis apenas provocar prováveis leitores que se dizem educadores.

Lupicínio e Adriana : pura beleza.

Música na Franca

Arnaldo, líder de um conjunto musical, foi meu vizinho em Franca. Aqui está uma obra dele.''

Manuel Queiroz, meu trisavô.

Aprendente ainda vivo

Há anos que não venho ao Aprendente. Hoje vim e, para minha surpresa vi que o blog aindaé visitado, iniste em estar vivo. Preciso voltar a publicar neste espaço, o Aprendente ainda é um espaço dialogal.

Trabalho e Educação Billett

Knowing in practice: Re-conceptualising vocational expertise Stephen Billett School of Vocational, Technology and Arts Education Faculty of Education, Griffith University NATHAN 4111 Australia Ph (61) 7 3875 5855 Fax (61) 7 3875 6868 Email s.billett@mailbox.gu.edu.au Billett S (2001) Knowing in practice: Re-conceptualising vocational expertise Learning and Instruction 11 (6) 431-452. Knowing in practice: Re-conceptualising vocational expertise The following re-conceptualisation of vocational expertise is premised on reconciling contributions from cognitive psychology with those from social and cultural theories of thinking and acting. Relations between the individuals acting and the social practice in which they act are proposed as bases for knowing and performance --- knowing in practice. Domains of knowledge are held to be products of reciprocal and interpretative construction arising from individuals’ engagement in social practice, rather than being abstracted disciplinary knowledge or disembedded sociocultural tools. The construction of the individuals’ domains of vocational practice is constituted reciprocally through their participation at work. Some implications for curriculum are also proposed. Introduction To date, views about expertise have largely been a product of theorising within cognitive psychology. This discipline has come to characterise expertise as the product of the breadth and organisation of individuals’ domain-specific knowledge comprising orders of procedures and levels of conceptual knowledge. Through work within this discipline over a period of three decades, expertise has come to be associated with the development of cognitive structures inside the head that can be applied skilfully in resolving problems associated with a domain of knowledge held as a long-standing truth. In this view, representations of knowledge held in memory are seen as being analogous to tools that can be applied to particular situations or impasses. However, resistance is mounting to the idea that the mind is located solely in the head and remote from the world beyond the skin (e.g. Scribner, 1997/1988; Wertsch, 1998). Not the least is the concern that performance in one situation does not predict performance in another, within the same domain of knowledge. Recent theorising has increasingly projected the mind into social practice and explored the relations between them. A non-dualist view is becoming more accepted, premised on the inseparability of relationships between individuals’ knowing and the social world in which they think and act (Rogoff, 1990; Scribner & Beach, 1993) and a concern to understand these relationships further (Scribner, 1997/1988). Some suggest a need to cast off dualism and the strong individual and mentalistic focus that has emerged from within cognitive psychology (e.g. Greeno, 1997; Hutchins, 1991). Some also propose that the individual’s contribution to this relationship represents no more than one component in the process of knowing that is distributed (Pea, 1993) or stretched (Lave, 1991) across social partners and artefacts. Others treat social determinism more cautiously, holding that cognition is both premised on individuals acting in socially-determined activities and sometimes separate from the physical circumstances (e.g. Cobb, 1998; Salomon, 1994), thereby locating roles for both individuals and social practice. The tension resides in the focus being on either capacities or practice (Pelissier, 1991) or on relations between the two. This leaves a conception of expertise that accounts for relations between the mind and social practice yet to be stated, and invites a reappraisal of current conceptions ofexpertise. The conception of expertise founded in mainstream American cognitive psychology based on individuals’ acquisition and organisation of domain-specific knowledge in memory sits uneasily with emerging views that include, emphasise or give primacy to the social and cultural contributions and their relationships to thinking, acting and knowing. With its focus on the internal processes of the mind, cognitive psychology is, on its own, unable to provide a comprehensive conception of expertise as it fails to account for the sources of knowledge, and their formation and transformations in the social world. Attempts to redress this positioning have guided recent work within the cognitive perspective (e.g. Resnick et al., 1991; Resnick et al., 1997). However, these are seen by some as attempts to merely contextualise cognitive theorising and as failing to enact fundamental shifts from viewing cognitive structures as acting ‘on’ to acting ‘in’ the social world (see Cobb, 1998). Taking these concerns, a conception of expertise is advanced that is locatable in the dynamic activities of social practices. It proposes how individuals come to know and act by drawing on cognitive, sociocultural and anthropological conceptions, and through an appraisal of the ontological premises of domains of knowledge. The interpsychological processes for developing expertise are held to be constituted reciprocally between the affordance of the social practice and how individuals act and come to know in the social practice. More than contextualising the cognitive account of expertise, relationships among social practice, activities and individual cognition are proposed as being central to this conception of expertise. Accordingly, it attempts to locate a path between the “twin hazards” of individual constructivism (particularly when portrayed as being overly mentalistic) and social determinism (Miller & Goodnow, 1995). Individuals’ construction of the knowledge that comprises a situated domain of expertise is founded in interpsychological processes of how individuals act within social practice, as this interaction interdependently engages knowledge with historical, cultural and situational geneses. This interdependence between the social practice and those who act within it (Lave, 1991) may be contested (Billett, 1995b) or resisted (Hodges, 1998). Consequently, individuals’ interactions with workplaces and the developments arising from these interactions are premised on participation in negotiated forms of engagement in work practice. Over time, these interpsychological processes result in the formation of intrapsychological attributes. However, as Vygotsky (1978) proposes, intrapsychological outcomes are a “ result of a long series of developmental events” (1978: 57) and the “process being transformed continues to exist and to change as an external form of activity before definitively turning inward” (1978: 57). Therefore, social situations --- such as workplaces --- are not just one-off sources of learning and knowing. Instead, they constitute environments in which knowing and learning are co-constructed through ongoing and reciprocal processes (Rogof1995; Valsiner, 1994). outcomes. The subjects were nominated as being either expert or non-expert on their frequency of success in predicting handicaps in horse races. There was no correlation amongst age, experience with handicapping and successful handicapping. Subjects were tested using the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), which correlates with the Full Scale IQ test (Ceci & Liker, 1986). The findings indicated no correlation between performance on these scales and expert or novice classifications. Therefore, general ability of the subjects was not a predictor of success. Another study, comparing responses to economics problems between college-educated students and subjects who had learnt their economics knowledge in the workplace, produced similar findings (Voss et al., 1983). The college-educated students performed better than their workplace-prepared counterparts when answering questions about economics, but floundered when faced with real work tasks. The workplace-prepared subjects did exceptionally well on the latter categories of tasks. A common factor, in these two studies and acknowledged in a recent review (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996) is that the existence of strong generalised processing ability alone, as indicated on an intelligence test, is not a sufficient quality for successful performance. The expert handicappers in Ceci and Liker's (1986) study, and workplace learners in Voss et al.’s (1983) study required the integrated use of both strategic and highly specific forms of knowledge, embedded in a particular domain of activity. Similarly, Schraagen (1993) found that, whereas experienced scientists could develop research designs for familiar problems, they could not do so in unfamiliar areas. Studies of hospitality workers concluded that not only the goals for performance, but much of the knowledge required for performance, was quite situationally specific (Stevenson, 1996). Similar findings were advanced from investigations of airline counter workers (Beven, 1997). These studies illustrate the significant role of domain-specific knowledge in the performance at work, and either the invisibility or low level of contribution provided by more general competencies. Further, these findings point to the indivisibility between social practice and domains of knowledge that are manifested in particular ways in these social practices. For instance, basketball referees were able to identify categories of fouls more effectively than basketball players or coaches (Allard et al., 1991 cited in Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). From what has been advanced above, domain specificity is salient for demanding thinking and acting, such as non-routine problem solving in everyday work activities. Therefore, contributions from the cognitive view are useful for understanding and identifying the attributes required for performance in goal-directed activities. Nevertheless, this view does little to account for the origins of these domains, nor for how individuals construct socially sourced knowledge in the forms of domains (Laufer & Glick, 1996). Yet, such is the interdependence in relationship between cognitive activities and the social world, that it possible to identify ways in which individuals’ construction of knowledge is structured by the goal-directed activities in which they engage. In illustrating this relationship, at least six bases can be identified from the cognitive literature (Billett, 1996). Firstly, the domain-specificity of expertise is associated with social practice. Consequently, salient principles which are indexed to social practice reflect the domain’s social genesis. Secondly, the knowledge constructed Page 7 through problem-solving is focused on resolving impasses set in the social world. Third, compilation of procedures and chunking of concepts is the result of ongoing engagement with socially-determined tasks. Fourth, transfer is socially and culturally constructed. Fifth, individuals' efforts are relational to social practice with some tasks extracting a more effortful response than others. And finally, socially determined dispositional factors are relational to cognitive structures and activities. Accordingly, the domain of knowledge and individuals’ learning of that knowledge, which includes its organisation and associations necessary for performance, are founded in relations with social practice. For instance, take the hallmark of expertise, success in non-routine problem solving within a domain. Beyond individuals’ familiarity with the activity, routineness will be determined by the norms of particular social practice (e.g. workplaces) as will judgments about the worth of solutions to those problems. In terms of vocational practice, the kinds of problems and what constitutes non-routine tasks will be located in particular instances of the vocational practice. For example, with automotive mechanics’ work, the routineness of workplace tasks will differ according the requirements of the work practice. In a major city dealership, where mechanics might work on only one or two makes of vehicles which may be under warranty, an expedient response to a faulty vehicle component might be replacement with another. However, in a garage in a small rural town, where mechanics work on all kinds, makes and ages of vehicles, and where spare parts are not easily sourced, a successful solution might be to repair the component part or fabricate another. So, whereas the cognitive view makes important contributions to understanding expert performance, the concept of domains advanced by this discipline needs extending to include those that can account for their source and development. Social and cultural conceptions of expertise: Practice Despite its prominence in the literature, the cognitive perspective does not monopolise views about what constitutes expertise. Other perspectives also offer important contributions. The sociocultural literature emphasises domains of social and cultural needs embedded in distinct lines of development within social practice (Scribner, 1985). From an anthropological perspective, Lave and Wenger (1991) refer to expertise as being ongoing movement towards full participation and the formation of identity within a particular community of practice, which is constantly evolving (Lave, 1993). In a similar way, Goodnow (1990) uses cultural psychology to make complementary contributions referring to the appropriateness of particular behaviour in culturally determined activities. These views emphasise particular social practice as the premise for expertise and as something arising through participation in the social practice: ‘knowing in practice’. These perspectives offer more than an alternative to the cognitive perspective, because they also offer ways of understanding the relationships between social practice and the mind. Sociocultural theory holds that the organisation and construction of knowledge are socially and culturally constituted. Within the sociocultural approach (Wertsch, 1991), or what Cole (1998) refers to as cultural history activity theory, four lines of the evolving social development of knowledge Page 8 are identified (e.g. Cole, 1998; Rogoff, 1990; Scribner, 1985;). These are: the phylogenetic --- the contribution to knowledge arising from the evolving history of the human species; the sociocultural --- the particular requirements of evolving cultural practice (e.g. a vocation); the ontogenetic --- the ongoing products of individuals’ learning throughout their lives through interaction with the social world; and the microgenetic --- the moment-by-moment learning of individuals. However, just as the domains of knowledge advanced in cognitive theory are abstracted epistemological truths, the sociocultural level of development is also disembedded from circumstances where individuals enact goal-directed activities. Sociocultural practice, which embodies cultural need, is remote and disembedded from actual practice just as the conception of a vocation (e.g. hairdresser, plumber, doctor) is disembedded from what occurs in the enactment of the vocation. This line of sociogenesis reflects cultural need (the vocation) rather than the exigencies of the enactment of that practice. It is at the situational level that the goal-directed vocational activities are shaped, albeit influenced by historical and sociocultural lines of development. The requirements of a particular vocational practice (e.g. in a particular hairdressing salon, medical practice, garage, coal mine) influence how the disembedded knowledge of the occupation is manifested in practice. Engestrom and Middleton (1996) refer to microsociological approaches, contexts and structuring of work as the product of local interactions and negotiations. Suchman (1996) similarly points to “a local order of familiar equipment and practices, specifically constituted for the work at hand.” (1996: 56) To account for the circumstances which furnish the goal-directed activities that individuals engage in and judgments about how these activities have been undertaken, the situational level warrants inclusion as a line of development within sociocultural theory. This directly acknowledges the contributions of situational factors where the historical and culturally derived knowledge is deployed and manifested in actual practice, as in cognitive accounts. The requirements of social practices (e.g. the workplace or work practice) can be understood by their activity systems (Engestrom, 1993) (e.g. division of labour, community, objects and rules) that determine how activities in particular work practice proceed. Moreover, given the range of factors comprising the activity system, the social practice, the activities within it and the requirements for performance are likely to be unique in some ways (Billett, 1998). These claims are supported by the kinds of analysis that Suchman (1996, 1997), provides in her accounts of an airport operations room where the activities are the product of the individuals and artefacts constitute a locally ordered work setting that is not pre-determined not static, but is continually re-constituting itself. Therefore, if complexes of situational factors differentiate particular social practice (such as workplaces), what comprises expertise will be conceptualised in different ways across communities of work practice (Wenger, 1998), because requirements for performance are founded in the social practice. This is the case even when an activity that is conceptually similar at the sociocultural level (e.g. an occupation), is being undertaken. Situational factors associated with the expert enactment of knowledge go beyond the possession of sociocultural technical skills or tools (e.g. cutting hair, Page 9 diagnosing a patient). Instead, these factors influence how these skills are manifested in a particular circumstance. Because of this, acceptable practice in one workplace may be quite inappropriate in another, as procedures are different and the goals for performance may be quite distinct. These factors influence not only the activities individuals engage in, but also what is taken as expert performance. In an investigation of work activities in four hairdressing salons, the goals for and bases of participation in hairdressing activities were determined by factors comprising the internal press of the workplace and external demands of the client community (Billett, 1995a). In each salon, the goals for hairdressing had distinctive features. Given the same set of hairdressing problems to resolve, hairdressers in each salon fashioned responses that had consistency across and within the salons as well as some individual variations. Therefore, some components of the responses were consonant with the goals and norms of the sociocultural practice (hairdressing), while others were those of the particular salons (situational manifestations of practice) and some idiosyncrasies arising from the hairdressers’ ontogenies. Observation revealed the characteristics of the vocational practice included what comprised performance in each salon. In a fashionable inner city salon, the key goals for performance were to transform the clients’ appearance, and to offer new cuts and colours. The interaction with clients in this salon was a product of the clientele and the interests and values (lifestyle) of the hairdressers. In a salon in a low socio-economic suburb, the requirements for performance were to manage a precarious business with an absent owner, two part-time senior hairdressers and a clientele that included those who demanded complex treatments, yet did not subsequently care for their hair. A key requirement here was to manage these ‘awkward’ customers when they returned complaining vociferously and forcefully about their treatments. In another salon, the clientele comprised elderly women who came for companionship as much as for hair treatments. Here, the hairdressers’ knowledge of clients’ personal histories, knowing the names and circumstances of family and friends, was an important component of practice. The fourth salon was in a provincial town in a rural region that was enduring a three-year drought. The goals here included providing good value to maintain the clientele and managing the difficult balance between eliciting additional service (colours and perms) yet not causing clients to choose between the cost of a hair treatment and groceries for home. The factors that constitute the social practice within each of the salons are identifiable by and may be explained through their activity systems that included the division of labour, rules and norms, relationships with the client community and the degree of internal cohesion. Each site had particular goals associated with the division of labour. For example, one salon had a rule that hairdressers should engage in tasks, as they became available, whose complexity was most consistent with their level of skills. These were part of the particular work practice insisted upon by the owner-manager. This resulted in clients frequently being swapped among hairdressers, as Page 10 tasks of greater accountability became available. At the salon in the low socio-economic suburb, there was some disagreement among the staff’ about their conception of hairdressing. However, these differences were subordinated by common concerns about the ‘awkward’ clients and security of employment. So there were concepts and procedures of the vocational practice that were common to each instance of vocational practice, the product of their activity systems (Engestrom 1993) and local negotiations (Suchman, 1996). Indeed, how these common views were negotiated also differed across these social practices. For example, in the trendy salon there were common values about hairdressing which were different from the almost familial atmosphere of another salon, which had different mores and values about hairdressing. In a third, there was a rigid form of internal press associated with the authority and presence of the owner-manager. For instance, the hairdressers operated under the owner’s rule of ‘no-yappers’. The hairdressing was to proceed in silence unless clients initiated conversations. The hairdressers in this salon developed a set of signals by which they communicated non-verbally. These mores led to particular work strategies being developed in this salon, some primarily associated with responding to idiosyncratic demands of the owner. The work in this salon progressed in comparative silence compared with the exchanges that occurred in the other salons and which were part of the rationale for the hairdressers’ work in the salon that catered to elderly women. In these ways, local negotiations (Suchman, 1996) determined the goals for practice. Similar situationally specific notions of competence were observable in open cut coal mines (Billett, 1995b). Even across mines owned by the same company, some of them on adjacent leases, there were different requirements for performance. These were premised on the history of ownership, different demarcations of work, historically entrenched work practices, the mine’s age and the mine’s location in the coal-bearing basin. Consequently, conceptions of expert performance are not uniform across these workplaces, with the differences being accounted for by the activity systems of these communities of work practice. Individuals’ engagement in work practice has consequences for accessing and learning situationally constituted knowledge. The work practice in each salon afforded quite different access to novices and experienced hairdressers alike and made different demands, with different consequences, for what they learnt. One variable was size. In smaller salons, the apprentices had responsibility for a wider range of activities earlier than in the larger ones. Another was culture of practice (Brown et al., 1989). In the trendy salon, each hairdresser worked on their own clients from greeting them at the door to getting them coffee, washing their hair, negotiating with them and styling their hair. So it was incumbent on the apprentice in this salon to take sole responsibility for clients as soon as possible. In another salon, key work tasks were divided among the hairdressers, and the apprentices were more focused on support and preparatory activities until their final year. There was also a privileging of particular knowledge amongst settings (Goodnow, 1990), some of which remained the sole domain of principal participants. For example, two owner- Page 11 managers maintained control over the ordering and management of stock. Therefore, in these salons, even senior hairdressers were denied the experience of managing stock. Yet, at another salon, the apprentice's role included checking and ordering stock. Consequently, although engaged in a common sociocultural practice, the salons not only had quite different requirements for expertise, but the way they afforded participation also differed. Expertise needs to be considered situationally, being related to the circumstances of the enactment of the vocational practice. This does not mean that the individual’s capacity to perform is welded to one setting. Rather, it recognises that expertise can only be understood within particular domains of knowledge and action (social practice), thus embedding it in particular social circumstances. Perhaps there is no such thing as a vocational expert per se, only those who are able to resolve non-routine and routine problems constituted by particular workplaces. For example, a hairdresser who might be expert in an inner city salon may not have some of the attributes required to be judged as an expert in one of the other salons. These characterisations are held to be qualities of expertise as situative phenomena. However, they constitute only one side of the interdependent relationship required for knowing at work. How individuals act in the social practice, thereby coming to know in ways that permit them to participate fully, and how they construct their domain of knowledge also reside with the individual. Therefore, the other dimension of the interdependence or interpsychological process is how individuals participate and construct knowledge. Individuals’ participation and construction: Knowing in practice The knowledge to be constructed by individuals and the means of that construction can be understood in terms of interdependence between the situation that comprises a domain of activities and goals, and the individuals acting in the social practice. This suggests that this knowledge, with its historical and cultural geneses, is manifested in particular ways in work practice, and that ultimately individuals’ appropriation of this embedded knowledge is interpretative or co-constructed (Valsiner, 1994; Wertsch, 1998). Accordingly, conceptions of domains need to include the individually constructed rule-system (procedures) and related conceptual knowledge (propositions), mediated by the socially derived circumstances in which they were deployed and appropriated interpsychologically. Over time, individuals’ situationally constructed domains of knowledge may become increasingly intersubjective when knowledge is shared with others, thereby engendering common aspects (Newman et al., 1989). However, it is unrealistic to expect complete concurrence and it is unlikely that knowledge that is opaque or not likely to be discussed will become intersubjective. Concept maps of the task of hair colouring generated by hairdressers in the four salons revealed much that was common (Billett, 1995a) at the superstructure level of their conceptual organisation (Groen & Patel, 1988). However, the microstructures of these concept maps were quite idiosyncratic. With concept maps of hair structures, the representations of the hairdressers’ knowledge were almost wholly idiosyncratic. The hairdressers claimed the differences were associated with the fact that hair colouring was discussed in the Page 12 workplace, whereas ‘hair structures’ were not talked about in the salons. Perhaps the reason for this is that hair structures are opaque and not accessible in hairdressing salons. Interestingly, the hairdressers claimed to associate concepts of hair structures with a different kind of social source: theory classes in technical colleges. Yet opportunities to develop intersubjectivity – for instance, with hair colouring do not mean that individuals will construct this knowledge wholly intersubjectively because idiosyncratic personal histories or ontogenies shape their constructions of knowledge (Billett, 1997). For instance, an English hairdresser working in Australia provided an atypical response to one problem. When asked about this response, the Australian hairdressers suggested that the solution was not appropriate in a hot climate where many clients spent time in chlorinated swimming pools. Further, as social practices are constantly transforming, the range of factors that determine the activity system must inevitably change over time. Whereas the sociocultural line of development reflects changing cultural needs (e.g. growing resistance to using chemicals in hairdressing), the situational level responds to factors at the level of the enactment of practice, which are themselves transforming. This transformation is ongoing because social practice such as that which occurs in workplaces is constantly being changed by the requirements of those who are the objects of its activities, those who work in them, the changing division of labour, relationships, and the norms and practices that constitute its activity systems (Engestrom & Middleton 1996; Suchman, 1996). For instance, since the investigation of the four hairdressing salons was completed, at least two of the salons have had a change of their ownership and significant changes in staff. It is within these constantly transforming situative domains of practice located in these workplaces that individuals engage in microgenetic development (moment-by-moment learning) (Rogoff, 1995), through their participation in goal-directed activities. Therefore, individuals’ interactions and negotiations within the social practice and their ability to maintain their participation represent an ongoing and evolving process. Individuals acting in social practice construct domains of knowledge; the construction of these domains is also mediated by their personal histories (e.g. their existing knowledge) and by the access to the activities of the particular social practice(s). This view of knowing in practice is quite distinct from those suggesting that domains of knowledge required for performance are objective bodies of knowledge, such as an academic disciplines or fields of study, not subject to interdependence among cultural need, social practice and individual interaction. Further, the degree to which hairdressers might be interested in being experts in a particular salon may well determine how they act in that social practice --- how their domains of vocational practice are shaped. Having been able to map the hairdressers’ interests and motivations, it seems improbable that some of them would be able to, or even be interested in, working in some of the other salons. Indeed, some hairdressers had deliberately self-selected and sought out their place of employment. Even under duress of the kind that was evident in one salon, they would most likely engage in mastery rather than appropriation of the knowledge accessed in the workplace (Wertsch, 1998). Despite the owner’s insistence that he knew best, the apprentices reported learning from other Page 13 apprentices with whom they interacted at college. These interactions broadened their understanding of procedures of vocational practice. These examples show that expertise is more relational to particular social practice than has perhaps been advanced within cognitive theory. The cognitive view focuses on capacities (cognitive structures, process and memory), while the situational view emphasises interactional systems that include individuals as participants interacting with others, artefacts and objects that comprise the social practice. So the contribution of individuals acting in social practice can be understood through a consideration of ontogeny as a product of the accumulation of experiences throughout life. Therefore, rather than being singular or uniform, the construction of knowledge is an interpretative outcome premised on individuals’ acting in social practice. Individuals’ unique bases of knowledge and ways of knowing are reflexively deployed through goal-directed activities in social practice as they co-construct (Valsiner, 1994) or appropriate (Rogoff, 1995; Wertsch, 1998) knowledge. Accordingly, the development of expertise from this view is characterised by intersections between the trajectories of the transforming social practice and individuals’ ontogenetic development. Because of their unique ways of knowing, individuals’ conceptions of the requirements for performance will likely be differentiated in some way from others acting in the social practice. Through interactions, greater subjectivity may be realised. Yet there is a dynamic interplay between the evolving requirements for performance in terms of activities and the fit of the individuals’ constantly evolving knowledge of that practice. Moreover, securing expertise is both ongoing and contested through individuals’ encounters and relations within the social practice, such as in workplaces. Engestrom and Middleton (1996) similarly conclude that expertise now needs to be viewed as the “ongoing collaborative and discursive construction of tasks, solutions, visions, breakdowns and innovations” (1996: 4). So the areas of complementarily between the cognitive and sociocultural theories host an invitation to build upon these theories to understand the relationships between the mind and social practice, rather than not wholly discarding one or the other of these sets of ideas. Yet is it possible to generalise from the findings of studies of hairdressers and coal miners? Are situated domains likely to be shaped only by particular spatial and shared activities, such as workplaces? Certainly, the kinds of intersubjectivities likely to arise when individuals directly interact in workplaces and at home are potentially of a different kind than where individuals practise their vocation or live in isolation from others. The kinds of coordinated activity that Suchman (1996; 1997) identifies in an airport operations room, discussions in the cockpits of commercial airlines (Hutchins & Palen, 1997) and those between shift workers in manufacturing (Trognon & Grusenmeyer, 1997) will likely result in enhanced intersubjectivity between social partners. However, direct interpersonal interactions are not the only set of social factors that shape performance. Scribner (1985) and Rogoff (1990) propose that cultural practices and norms shape even the most apparently solitary activities. Scribner (1985) uses Marx’s example of the solitary lighthouse keeper to illustrate that practices and Page 14 expectations (goals) with historical and social geneses shape even this solitary work. An artist working in the isolation of his studio reported shaping his practice to account for situational factors determining the kinds and purposes of his work that included physical environments and consideration of the market (Billett, 1999). Similarly, Goodnow (1990) claims that academic journals from Europe have quite different character and value different emphases than those from the United States. Hence the requirements for performance are products of different cultural practice. Even a common language has localised and cultural variations, making its enactment in different kinds of circumstances subject to particular requirements and knowledge about how to proceed. Perhaps the sociogenesis is strongest when individuals can encounter the direct guidance that makes shared understanding of historically, culturally and situationally constituted practice highly accessible and where practice is physically situated to afford models and access to cultural practices. Nevertheless, even the vocational practitioner who works alone (e.g. the concert pianist) is likely to be confronted by expectations of and requirements for performance that will differ across situations and circumstances (e.g. piano, acoustics, repetoire). Re-conceptualising expertise In re-conceptualising expertise as something that is situated, dynamic, founded in and relational to practice, some of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) propositions provide useful starting points. They refer to full participation in a community of practice, rather than expertise. Even then, full participation is shaped by a belief that all practitioners are peripheral in the sense that practice itself is fluid and evolving. Hence there is no such thing as central participation. They propose four qualities for full participation. Firstly, learning about a social practice is realised through the process of becoming a full participant. Access to and participation in the community’s activities are necessary bases for the understanding required for full participation. Consequently, engagement over time is required for the appropriation of situationally germane knowledge and skilfulness. In this way, expertise is defined more broadly than the possession of skilful knowledge; it also comprises competence in the norms and cultural practices that sustain and utilise these skills. This view emphasises a focus on the requirement of particular practice, and the need to move from peripheral (novice) to full participation (expertise) within that practice. Third, full participation implies being capable with new activities, performing new tasks and comprehending new understanding (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This view is consonant with the attributes of experts to be adaptable and transferable (i.e. -the cognitive hallmark of expertise - non-routine problem solving). Fourth, individuals are defined by, as well as defining, their relationship with the social practice in which they participate. For example, as full participants, senior hairdressers, owners and managers determine how the vocational practice of hairdressing is conducted and what constitutes acceptable performance and the division of labour. This again emphasises the reciprocity within socially determined activities (Rogoff, 1995; Valsiner, 1994). Page 15 As noted, cultural values are also germane to social practice and constitute a need to include these culturally determined dispositional aspects of competence. Goodnow (1990) proposes that competent performance is circumstantial, with some behaviour being seen as being more smart or intelligent than others in given circumstances. Although some behaviour, which would be described as being intelligent, is adaptive and similar across cultures, there will be situationally determined variants. As the view of expertise being proposed emphasises credibility within social practice, it needs to include behaviours and approaches that are likely to be held as being ‘intelligent’ in the particular circumstances. For instance, there is an expectation of being cool and logical in work planning situations, spontaneous and light in social situations, and emotional in romantic situations (Goodnow, 1990). Also, on some occasions, some approaches to problem solving are better than others. Equally, some problems will be viewed as significant, whilst others are trivial. The significance of problems and the valuing of solutions will be determined by the social and cultural exigencies of the particular practice. Finally, some skills and some areas of knowledge are seen in some communities as belonging to some people more than others. The community of practice determines a hierarchy of tasks (Lave, 1990) and, within that, there may be knowledge reserved for particular groups. This privileging determines access. Drawing on these social and cultural factors, a tentative conception of expertise that encompasses cognitive, social and cultural dimensions is proposed. Experts’ knowledge and its organisation, as conceptualised within the cognitive literature, are subsumed within this view. That is, the organisation and development of knowledge permits individuals to address non-routine problems within a domain of activity. However, more than just being a collection of situated examples of cognitive activity, expertise emphasises the interdependence of the social and cultural influences on this knowledge, the participation in practice required to know, and the strong role played by ‘non-cognitive’ cultural dispositions in performance at work. In these ways, distinctions between practice or capacities (Greeno, 1997; Pelissier, 1991) have been softened by suggesting that these capacities are influenced by and constructed through participation in social practice at intersections between the social practice and individuals’ ontogenies. Therefore, the key elements of this conceptualisation of expertise are its relational, embedded, competent, reciprocal and pertinent characteristics. Consequently, it is proposed that expertise: (i) is relational in terms of requirements of a particular social practice in which it is enacted; (ii) is embedded , being the product of extensive practise, with meaning about practice derived by becoming a full participant, over time, and with understanding shaped by participation in the activities and norms of that practice; (iii) comprises competence in the community's discourse, in the routine and non-routine activities, mastery of new understanding, and the ability to perform and adapt existing skills; (iv) is reciprocal , shaping as well as being shaped, by the community of work practice, which includes setting and maintaining standards of the practice; and Page 16 (v) requires pertinence in the appropriateness of problem solutions, such as knowing what behaviours are acceptable, and in what circumstances, in problem-solving. This quality reflects the values a community of work practice assigns to problems and the appropriate amount of effort and understanding of what knowledge is privileged. Considerations for curriculum A view of expertise as located in particular social practice presents the relationship between what has to be known (i.e. the norms, procedure, and concepts) and the knower (the individual) as a dynamic one. This relationship can be considered in terms of curriculum as pathways of participation in social practice. Such pathways are referred to in both the cognitive and sociocultural literatures. Cognitive psychology posits a pathway to expertise through the acquisition of procedural and conceptual knowledge, organised and richly indexed to facilitate complex thinking activities, such as adaptability, transfer and non-routine problem solving within a socially constituted domain (Gott, 1989; Royer, 1979). A sociocultural pathway to expertise is associated with engagement in particular social practices and seen as a trajectory towards the goal of participating fully, through engagement in tasks of increasing accountability. Over time, this participation leads to the acquisition of ‘skilful knowledge’, but also to the facility to engage successfully in the discourse, norms and practices of the particular social practice (Engestrom & Middleton, 1996; Goodnow, 1990; Säljö, 1999), thereby emphasising relations between capacities and practice. Commonality across both perspectives include the construction of knowledge arising through problem-solving that permits successful performance within a specific set of circumstances. The goals within these problem-solving processes are socially sourced, as are procedures used to secure those goals. While both perspectives refer to the application of salient concepts to secure outcomes, the sociocultural and cultural psychology views both emphasise relational aspects of competence. Together, they emphasise that expertise will likely be realised through social circumstances that provide the kinds of problems and solutions that are relational to and authentic within those circumstances. That is, learning experiences that are divorced from those activities and goals found in the circumstances where the knowledge is to be applied (e.g. substitute activities and sites) may not develop the kinds of knowing required to respond successfully to non-routine tasks. In this view of expertise, novices do not necessarily lack capability. They may, however, lack access to the knowledge within a particular domain of activities (practice) that permits the conceptualisation and categorisation of problems and, consequently, the capacities to secure goals. Differences amongst social practice and requirements for performance raise further concerns about the potential to transfer knowledge from one setting to another. The complex of situational factors and local negotiations that comprises practice may explain the problem of transfer across situations where the same vocational activity is being conducted. For example, the particular social circumstances of educational institutions and workplaces (those situations where vocational practice is conducted) are rendered quite distant from each other by analyses premised Page 17 on activity as the basis for knowing in practice. Further, accounts of the contributions of situational factors and local negotiations defy the value of highly detailed and prescriptive curricula intents that are increasingly favoured in vocational education, often in behavioural formats (i.e. competency standards). The situational factors also challenge assumptions that knowledge can be understood by decontextualised and abstracted entities (e.g. key or generic competencies). It is the particular complex of factors that gives meaning to problem-solving activities in the community of work practice, and solutions need to account for these factors. Therefore, developing expertise requires more than a focus on cognitive and sociocultural tools. How those tools are enacted in particular circumstances and activities is crucial. Although shaped by sociocultural sources that convey durable knowledge, this knowledge is also embedded in domains of activities within the social practice, thereby transforming the abstracted knowledge through its application (e.g. the teaching or deployment of academic disciplines). Expertise includes that which permits the resolution of non-routine problems to the satisfaction of the requirements of social practice. Conceptions of curriculum, therefore, need to take into account how goals for performance vary and articulate how it is possible to develop knowledge that is robust enough to transcend the particular workplace. Therefore, in developing robust knowledge in individuals, different conceptions of solutions to problems and their adequacy need to be appraised. Variability in practice needs to be emphasised, with principles and practices identified that assist knowing about different kinds of solutions and evaluations of their appropriateness. For instance, apprentice chefs might learn about different ways of thickening sauces. These ways of knowing would include the application of existing sociocultural practice (e.g. a rue for white sauce and arrowroot for fruit flans), what kinds of thickening are likely to be useful in different kinds of catering (e.g. restaurant and hospital food) and for different kinds of purposes (further thickening a sauce that is too thin, cost considerations). This strengthens the view that it is not sufficient to learn just the knowledge and procedures of sociocultural development. It also elaborates the reasons why learning experiences should also focus on conditions of application of the knowledge and skills to be learnt and how those applications might vary across instances of vocational practice. Summary In sum, a dynamic, negotiated and situated view of expertise is advanced here building upon the contributions from cognitive psychology (e.g. Ericcson & Lehmann, 1996; Ericsson & Smith, 1991), anthropology (Lave, 1993; 1991), cultural psychology (Goodnow, 1990) and sociocultural theory (e.g. Cole, 1998; Wertsch, 1991; 1998), and others whose work sits between these disciplines (Rogoff, 1990; 1995). Central to this case is the conception of domains of knowledge. Rather than being epistemological truths with an objective and singular character, such as those associated with academic study, socially determined activities constitute domains of knowledge Page 18 that are shaped by history and culture. In turn, these individuals construct this knowledge as personally structured and organised domains, which may become increasingly intersubjective if shared through interpsychological processes in workplaces. Both cognitive psychology and sociocultural theory advance conceptions of domains that are abstracted and remote from the circumstances in which goal-directed activities of vocational practice are enacted. As others have argued (e.g. Cobb, 1998; Lave, 1993), it is not adequate to merely add contextual factors to cognitive conceptions. Nor is it useful to emphasise social and cultural contributions at the cost of discarding the individual as a significant and interdependence agent (Salomon, 1994). Instead, there are bases for reconciling the cognitive and sociocultural perspectives and important contributions from other disciplines that augment and advance our understanding of thinking, acting and knowing. Consequently, the proposal here sits within concerns that elaborate and reappraise ideas advanced within cognitive psychology (e.g. domains of knowledge, expertise, problem solving) and acknowledge the contributions of both capacities and practice to the formation of expertise and its development by individuals. In doing so, it sits within and contributes to current discussions about the relationships between social practice and individuals acting in social practice, through attempting to avoid the ‘twin hazards’ of individual constructivism and social determinism (Miller & Goodnow, 1995). Ultimately, expertise is held to be a product of interdependence between the individual acting and the social practice in which they act: ‘knowing in practice’. 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