The language-based education of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has proved more productive than the earlier apprentice learning since it offers cognitive development. The first priority of a modern curriculum should be such cognitive development, and language remains the most suitable tool for this purpose. Politically, the full enjoyment of freedom requires literacy; this is evidenced by the fact that the black population in the United States has made its best social progress when its greater linguistic sophistication enabled it to respond to such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson. The contemporary tendency to condescend to students by restricting them to vocational education and by reducing the requirements of linguistic competence stymies their cognitive development and bars them from full democratic participation. (DF)