James Moffett is revered by many for his contributions to English education, but his interest in discourse and rhetoric led him beyond reform in the language arts curriculum to a vision of a radically reconceived approach to education, one in which disciplinary knowledge is subordinate to the processes of symbolic representation that creates that knowledge. This article traces the emergence of this proposal in Moffett's discussions of theory and pedagogy, and draws links between his ideas and the focus on language-as-social-action that came to dominate North American writing studies in the 1980s.