During the first week of August, 1983, thirty youngsters from various backgrounds and schools, ages nine through fourteen, came together for Phil-A-Kid 300, an elective enrichment program administered by the University of Pennsylvania and funded by a grant from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. They spent five days engaged in a wide variety of activities in an equally wide variety of settings acquiring a particular literacy skill: They were learning to history in order to conceive what life was like in Philadelphia one hundred years ago. They were, to use Paulo Freire's (1983) phrase, learning to read the to create it as it must have been in that period and, further, to create for themselves roles within that so they could experience life as they might have lived it a century earlier. A child, Friere writes, learns to his before he learns to words as he interacts with that world, its text, words, and letters incarnated in a series of things, objects, signs, and language itself. Reading the word is but a part of the wider process of human development and growth based on an understanding of both one's own experience and one's social world. Reading the is a creative, dynamic process in the child can be said to be writing a new text which must been seen as one means of transforming the world (p. 5). Such a process is complex, but is successfully accomplished nonetheless by most children. Phil-A-Kid, however, was undertaking to train young people to and write a not their own, the of Centennial Philadelphia, by means of conscious practical work, an ambitious undertaking if one believes with Friere that such a task is accomplished uniquely by each student as he or she participates in, experiences, assembles, interacts with, and manipulates that world.