This book on the social semiotics of education consists of seven chapters, dealing with: an exploration of the relationships among semiosis, discourse, text and ideology; the search for a dynamic and critical social theory of both micro-and macro-relations; textual-political goals, Bakhtin's heteroglossia, and Halliday's functional analysis; technical discourse and technocratic ideology; the location of the self in the interaction of the material and social subject; and the outline of a 'grand system' view of society as an epigenetic system.