As Joel Spring's (2007/this issue) description of Singapore's Orchard Road suggests, Benetton, Zara, Nike, BMW, LG, and Microsoft dominate the visual and textual landscape where signage, advertising, packaging, labeling, and the environments of the connected underground malls and walkways merge into a wall-to-wall, 24/7 print and visual mediation (C. Luke, 2006). However, behind the storefronts and underneath the multistory videoscreens of Orchard Road in Singapore, Nathan Road in Kowloon, within the central shopping malls and markets of Tokyo, Bangkok, and Shanghai, on and around the public transport and vertical public housing of these cities, we hear and see complex, local linguistic, and cultural ecologies. On its surface, this textual world is a montage of images of fashion and beauty, material wealth, cultural identity, sexuality, and, on occasion, even spirituality--touting the promises of modernity and hypermodernity, technology, and consumption in achieving these. As Spring argues, the dominant mythologies and ideologies of the new world order are at work here. The author of this article concurs with Spring's broad educational project. A democratic education in these economic conditions requires a strong reorientation toward environmental and civic ethics; a renewed humanism that enables and values diverse forms of cultural, spiritual, and economic life; and, of course, a new responsibility to the biosphere, as Native North American, Inuit, Maori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have always demanded. However, it must as well be based on an understanding of the stratification of the orders of discourse of the new capitalism. The purpose of a critical language education would be to make these master discourses accessible, namable, criticizable, and open to moral and ethical challenge.