Many students assume that they know what they’ll see—in books, people, or anything else—because that’s what they’ve been taught, relentlessly and often subliminally. By the time they were learning to read, many schools had moved away from teaching traditional phonics. Instead of asking kids to sound out letters, the new approach, called “whole language,” had them divine words from only the first letter, the context, and maybe a picture. In some cases, teachers covered up the word and had students guess what it was. The implication was that language is reliable, consistent, and predictable, which is awfully boring—and dangerous.