Addressing some of the major contemporary issues in education, particularly illiteracy and the growing mediocrity in academic performance, this work argues that the current state of affairs in education is the result not simply of poor training in elementary school or the disappearance of grammatical study from the overall curriculum but of a larger cultural problem. The work suggests that students in the 1990s, raised in a non-historical and iconic environment, do not live in time as an emergent, continuous medium in which the complexities of experience are parsed and organized. It claims that their psychological world is largely devoid of syntax - of causal, differential, and temporal relations between events. The result, it argues, is a cultural world characterized by a vast subpopulation of young (and not so young) people for whom the past is an unsubstantiated rumour and the future an unacknowledged responsibility. The book claims additionally that contemporary educators have become cultural speculators who disregard a basic truth about how the mind develops, namely that it needs to be grounded in reality and time.