Written language changed the nature of pedagogy.

Pedagogy was reshaped around the tools and skills of written language (see Figure 3). Learning to use books and writing implements, to encode and decode language, became principal enterprises of school. The codification of knowledge in books also tended to elevate the significance of that knowledge. The teacher-student relationship was structured around the transmission of a body of information. Changes in that information came at relatively long intervals, in part because of the complexity and expense of issuing new editions in print.