<p>Teachers of basic skills too often perceive their students as victims of an intellectual disease. To recast this educational vision, the author suggests new philosophic premises for viewing nontraditional learners, asserting that basic skills students, like everyone else, have innate knowledge that teachers can help them discover and enhance. Of major significance is the universal skill of inference that many identify as a key activity in critical thinking. The author describes how inference contributes to both visual (also labeled "sentient") and verbal literacy and suggests strategies for mining students' inferential powers. These strategies are designed to help basic skills students bridge the divide between recognizing their own inherent ability to infer meaning when reading, and using this knowledge of inference when writing for other readers.</p>