This book explores the rhetorical turn as a major perspective for education, and introduces 'new' rhetoric as a theoretical, methodological and practical framework within educational studies. It examines how rhetorical concepts can be used as tools to enable students, teachers, scholars and citizens to become 'symbol-wise', to understand the way linguistic, cultural and narrative symbols work, and to develop critical engagement with, as well as on behalf of, those symbols.

The book identifies how new rhetoric not only offers an understanding of how language functions in the establishment of social identities, but acts as a framework to engage in the discussion about the question of purpose in education.