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Composition in America
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In just over one-hundred years, American notions about the place, form and purpose of
composition in education have undergone profound alteration. Between the 1870s and today,
the ideas of two educational reformers - one a chemist and the other a philosopher -
led Americans not only to abandon classical models of education but also to elevate
composition skills (in English) among the populace and eventually to emphasize
self - expression as the raison d'etre for writing. Some background on the demographics
of mid and late nineteenth century America is critical to understanding the subsequent
course of written language in American education.
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The national purse: America in the second half of the nineteenth century
It is, of course, a truism that the United States is a nation of immigrants. The decades
after the American Civil War, especially between 1890 and 1910, brought large numbers of
foreigners to American shores. With the exception of the Irish, the vast majority of these
were non-English-speaking.
Since today's "immigrant" is tomorrow's "native," it has often
been difficult to differentiate "foreigner" from "American." However, a common variable
linking much of the American population of the late nineteenth century was their minimal
level of formal education. Schooling beyond rudimentary skills was deemed neither necessary
nor affordable by the majority of the farm-based or laborer populace. While states began
requiring free schooling to be available as early as 1852 (in the case of Massachusetts),
attendance was hardly the norm. As late as 1870, only two percent of all seventeen-year-olds
graduated from high school. By 1900, that number had risen to six-point-three percent
(Gere, 1987:37).
Not surprisingly, the percentage of students participating in higher
education was small. In 1770, the country boasted only 3,000 living college alumni
(out of a population of about three million - see Missons of the College Curriculum, 1977:20).
A hundred years later, only one percent of the nation's crop of seventeen-year-olds later
graduated from college (Gere, 1987:37).
Yet like many immigrant and/or underclass populations,
growing numbers of Americans recognized the importance of learning to speak and write "correct"
English. At the grass roots level, this movement (redolent of its counterparts among the rising
lower classes in eighteenth and nineteenth century England) was evidenced in trends ranging
from growing sales of dictionaries to the formation, in the early twentieth century, of
"Better English Clubs" (Drake, 1977:19, 36). (See Crowley, 1989; Crowley, 1991 and Mugglestone,
1995 for discussion of language standardization issues in British English.)
The mid and late nineteenth century educational push was further bolstered by an additudinal
shift about the very nature of the American English tongue. A century earlier, Noah Webster had
displayed his revolutionary spirit in arguing that American English was distinct from British
English, with its own vocabulary, grammar and spelling. But a hundred years later, the pendulum
had swung in the opposite direction. American linguistic guardians (reacting, in large part,
against the waves of immigrants) once more saw prescriptive standards (and British standards,
at that) as needed bulwarks to maintain the purity of spoken and written English (Drake, 1977).
This insistence upon prescriptive standards became an important theme in the subsequent rise of
English composition in America; it only began to subside in the 1970s and 1980s.
A high immigrant population, low levels of formal education, grass roots movements to improve
language skills and an emphasis on prescriptive standards all made late nineteenth century
America ripe for a national emphasis on English composition. The efficient cause, however,
was a set of transformations in educational pedagogy that would profoundly alter notions
about the relationship between spoken and written language.
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Transformation from a spoken to a written pedagogical model
From the founding of Harvard in 1636 through most of the nineteenth century, American
higher education bore two characteristics of relevance to our discussion. First, the
mode of instruction was overwhelmingly oral. Students provided oral answers to questions
posed verbally, recited memorized passages and regularly engaged in oral disputations
and speech contests.
The emphasis on oral pedagogy was a direct continuation of the rhetorical model of the
medieval and early modern English university. However, while recognizing eighteenth and
nineteenth century rhetoric as spoken language, it is critical we be clear that this
rhetorical style profoundly differed from everyday speech. Based on the rhetoric of
Cicero and Quintilian, medieval and early modern rhetoric filled a related role in formal
disputations, whether legal, political or religious. Regrettably, some contemporary
discussion (e.g., Clark, 1990) confuse this earlier formal rhetorical mode with the
conversational style of a lot of modern composition.
Second, the language of study was predominantly Latin, with some Greek added for good measure.
In fact, the closest most college students of the day came to composition in English was
through written translations of classical texts. This focus on classical languages, also an
English import, was bolsteredby Lockean (and ultimately Aristotelian) notions about the
composition of the human mind. If, so the argument goes, we assume the mind is composed of
a collection of faculties (such as reasoning, observation and attention), then education consists
in exercising those faculties much as one would exercise muscles. The content of the exercise
matters less than how vigorous it is.
In America, proponents of the "mental muscle" theory viewed classical languages as the best
form of mental exercise. Even if one eventually needed to speak and write eloquent English
(as did future ministers, who constituted a significant proportion of the seventeenth through
nineteenth century American college population), Latin was assumed to be a better avenue for
sharpening one's skills, since presumably it was harder.
When they did write English, what did students write about? Loftly, impersonal themes such as
"Can the Immortality of the Soul Be Proven?" or "Whether the Soul Always Thinks" (Myers, 1996:38).
More modern, individually motivated themes did not emerge until Charles W. Eliot and John Dewey
profoundly altered national presuppositions about the goals of higher and lower education.
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Eliot's model: adapting the German research university to America
When Charles W. Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869, he set to work changing the face
of higher education in America and, in the process, altered lower education as well. Himself
a product of both Harvard College and a pivotal stint in Germany studying chemistry, Eliot
conceptually redefined Harvard's educational goals which, in turn, became the model for the
rest of the nation.
Underlying nearly all of Eliot's ideas was his drive to adapt the German research university
model to the United States. Eliot's changes included introducing an undergraduate elective system,
eliminating requirements in the classics, building an advanced undergraduate and graduate research
program (complete with seminars, research papers and scholarly publication), and, along with
Andrew White at Cornell, instituting written examinations (Graff, 1987:32). As part of the
curricular revolution, the study of English - philology, literature and composition - assumed
a new identity.
Early in his presidency (1872), Eliot appointed Adams Sherman Hill, a lawyer-turned-newspaperman,
to asssist the current Boyleston Professor of Rhetoric, Francis James Child. Hill recast what
had been a four-year traditional rhetoric program, emphasizing spoken and written grammatical
correctness and literary style, into what would become higher education's ubiquitous one-year
freshman composition course. Equally importantly, Hill introduced the first college placement
examination in English, supporting Eliot's agenda for pressing lower education into raising its
standards in English composition. The German model of higher education that Eliot so admired
presumed that university students had learned to write in lower school. Until American lower
schools could ensure the same tough standards, Harvard (and its sister institutions) would need
to provide remedial service. (See, e.g., Krug, 1961 for a selection of Eliot's writings on popular
education.) But what were students to write about? In earlier decades, the themes had been
set by the instructor in rhetoric. Hill, building on his newspaper experience, instead asked
his students to write objectively about their observations and perceptions of everyday life.
Hill's successor, Barrett Wendell, introduced the daily theme, intended to "teach a young writer
to recognize and grasp the individual nature of experience" (Myers, 1996:49).
By the end of the nineteenth century, the composition revolution at Harvard had profoundly
affected many aspects of teaching the English language. Colleges around the country developed
versions of Harvardžs writing program, and English composition as a discipline began its
inexorable separation from philology (soon to become linguistics) and from English literature
(which was to become the province of the new, "scientific" English Department). But for our
purposes, the most important effect of Harvardžs revolution in composition was that a new purpose
was defined for teaching writing. Instead of learning a rhetorically-based imitation of classical
style whose goal was to expound on abstract themes, college students were asked to formulate
their observations of individual daily experiences. While the required medium of expression was
writing, the redefined theme opened the door to what would become in the decades that followed
the expression of a personal voice. And over time, the expression of that voice, although in
writing, came to sound more and more like speech.
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Dewey's model: progressive education
In the same decades that saw Eliot's reforms in higher education, a new model of lower
education was percolating across Europe and America. Froebel in Germany, Starcke in Denmark,
Binet in France, Montessori in Italy, Francis Parker in Massachusetts, John Dewey in Chicago
and then New York and Abraham Flexner in New York all sought to redefine how a nation's children
should be educated. Such efforts came to be known collectively as "progressive education."
The term "progressive education" has been loosely applied to a spectrum of educational reform,
dating back most recently to Rousseau. The common elements loosely linking all of these movements
include:
1) a child-centered (as opposed to teacher-centered) approach to education. 2) an emphasis on
fostering creative self-expression in children. 3) the belief that children cannot be taught;
rather, they learn by doing, aided by guidance from adults. 4) the view of schools as social
(and socializing) institutions.
For the progressive education movement, school was not a place to drill students in skills or even
to impart information but a venue for developing the childžs individual potential as a member of
society through guidance from teachers and association with age-mates. In Dewey's words, "the only
true education comes through the stimulation of the childžs powers by the demands of the social
situations in which he finds himself" (Lang, 1898:6).
In the United States, progressive education had an episodic history. It received a measure of
recognition in the 1910s through the 1930s. None other than Eliot became the honorary president
of the Progressive Education Association (founded in 1919), followed, upon his death, by Dewey
himself. The movement receded during the Depression and World War II, only to reappear under
influence from the British Open Classroom movement in the 1950s and, perhaps more importantly,
as we shall see a little later on, from the Vietnam generation of the 1960s and 1970s.
While the general effects of progressive education would not be strongly felt in the United
States until the last quarter of this century, Dewey's commitment to personal, creative self-
expression in children had an early and profound effect on one area of the lower school curriculum:
teaching writing. In 1920, William Hughes Mearns (an English teacher and writer) became the head of
the Lincoln School, a laboratory school founded by Abraham Flexner and run under the aegis of
Teachers College at Columbia University. Dewey had moved from the University of Chicago to Columbia
in 1905, and through Mearnsž leadership, the Lincoln School was to become a continuing laboratory for
Dewey's ideas on progressive education.
Mearns created for his students an English curriculum that focused not on historical analysis or
grammatical correctness but on self-expression (Myers, 1996:104). Following Flexner's injunction that
students' "intellectual and aesthetic capacities ought to develop on the basis of first-hand experience"
(Flexner, 1923:100), Mearns replaced the traditional lower-school English curriculum of grammar,
spelling, penmanship and literature with what he labeled "creative writing." Again following Dewey,
Mearns viewed his task as teacher to be one of guide, not instructor. Writing, Mearns said (1925:28),
is: "an outward expression of instinctive insight [that] must be summoned from the vasty deep of our
mysterious selves. Therefore, it cannot be taught; indeed, it cannot even be summoned; it can only be
permitted." As a form of self-expression, writing reflects onežs own voice. In fact, Mearns once
described poetry as "when you talk to yourself" (Mearns, 1943). Mearns' curricular innovations
(and those of kindred spirits in progressive education) were to have two important effects on pedagogy
later in the century. The first was on perceived relationships between spoken and written language.
By emphasizing the importance of student self-expression and diminishing the role of teacher as expert,
progressive education supported a model of writing as the transcription of thoughts initially expressed
through speech rather than thoughts mediated by writing as a distinct form of language. This model was
further reinforced by the assumption that the mechanics of "correct" writing should take a back seat
to the unfettered expression of ideas.
The second effect was on pedagogical assumptions about what type of teaching is appropriate for what
age student. Progressive education was designed for lower-school training. (Recall that in late
nineteenth and early twentieth century America, relatively few students completed high school, much
less continued on to college.) Moreover,Dewey himself had argued that by the time children are about
age twelve, their educational agenda should shift from cooperative to individually designed projects
(see Cremin, 1961:140-141). Yet ironically, the model of teacher as guide-on-the-side, originally
designed for elementary and junior high school students, would later become the dominant American
model for teaching college students across the curriculum. As a result, in contemporary America, there
is often no serious place in eighteen years of formal schooling for the classical model of writing as
a discrete form of linguistic representation, complete with its own standards for grammar, punctuation,
spelling and style.
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post Word War II America
Higher education in post World War II America was signficantly affected first by the veterans'
benefits and then by an unofficial war half-way around the world. Thanks to the so-called GI Bill,
over two million veterans of World War II poured into American colleges and universities (Myers,1996:159).
A college education was to become the American expectation, not the exception. While the college
curriculum of the 1940s and 1950s had been relatively traditional (Myers, 1996:200), the Vietnam War
(and the national attitudinal changes it engendered) fostered a different model: student-centered,
dialogic, "relevant"; in short, progressive education.
The implications of this shift for the teaching of writing and for attitudes towards the written word
more generally were far-reaching. Prescriptivism began falling into decline, heralded by the appearance
of the descriptively-based Websteržs Third International Dictionary, but fueled by a growing insistence
upon spontaneous self-expression at the expense of edited prose. Transformations in the college writing
curriculum reflected these political and social trends and were, in turn, instrumental in recasting
American notions about the relationship between spoken and written language.
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Computers and Writing
Since World War II, composition programs in America have successively embraced three distinct
(though sometimes overlapping) models of how writing should be taught, reflecting, in turn,
three different assumptions about the goal of student writing. The first, a traditional model
that has roots in eighteenth and nineteenth century classical rhetoric, takes the goal of writing
to be imparting knowledge. Accordingly, writers are trained to focus on the "product" they are
generating, with the expected attention to details of written mechanics and style. This model
has persisted throughout the second half of the twentieth century, although with decreasing
popularity.
The second, so-called "process" model, emphasizes the act of writing more than the
written result. Students are encouraged to do considerable preplanning ("prewriting") as well
as multiple drafts, but the prescriptive mechanics of written style are de-emphasized. In both
the traditional and the process models, writing is seen as an individual activity. However,
while the traditional model encourages objective presentation ("It appears that . . ," "One
might argue that . . ."), the process model allows for more individual expression ("I think . . .").
In essence, the process model embraces the self-expression component of progressive education.
The third model is more social/dialogic. The purpose of writing is no longer expression of objective
information or self-expression but what has come to be called the social construction of knowledge
(see, e.g., Clark, 1990: Chapter 1). Rather than being a solitary activity, writing is envisioned
as a group conversation, utilizing not only peer review but even group composition. Conceptually,
the social/dialogic model incorporates progressive education's views of schools as social
(and socializing) institutions which, in Deweyžs words, lead children to use their "own powers
for social ends" (Lang, 1898:9).
As some (Hawisher et al., 1996) have noted, developments in
the use of computers to teach composition have capitalized upon the emergence of first the
process and then the social/dialogic models of writing. The era of stand-alone word-processors
made it possible to relegate writing mechanics to the computer, leaving the author free to
concentrate on more "important" things, such as ideas. Word-processing also enabled writers to
produce successive drafts without needing to rewrite or retype the entire text each time
(see, e.g., Bean,1983:146).
Networked computing lent technological impetus to the third,
social/dialogic model of writing. Trent Batson, one of the early pioneers of computer mediated
communication for teaching writing, even argued that "some of the current theories about how to
teach writing [seemed to be] developed specifically with networks in mind" (Batson, 1988:32).
More probably, we might argue that education in the 1970s and 1980s was ripe for progressive
thinking, which drove models for teaching composition and much of the personal computer revolution
more generally (see, for example, Reingold's 1993 discussion of the American counter-culture roots
of modern computing). The development of hypertext programs (e.g., Michael Joyce and Jay Bolter's
Storyspace and the work of George Landow - see Bolter, 1991; Landow, 1992) helped move the notion
of writing groups (for the purpose of peer review ã see Gere, 1987) to the idea of group writing,
where multiple authors create a single text seriatim. (See Murray, 1997 for current visions of
the future of collective composition in cyberspace.)
The introduction of computers into the
composition process facilitated - though it had not initiated - the shift of emphasis in
composition from an individual's objective exposition to an interpersonal dialogue that is,
as likely as not, more informal than formal. The fact that word-processors relegated the
mechanics of writing to second-class status reinforced existing trends in manually-produced
writing (e.g., to use pronunciation in written prose as if it were marking pauses in spoken
discourse - see Danielewicz and Chafe, 1985). The fact that networking incorporated interlocutors
into the composition process (either as commentators or as co-authors) further confirmed students'
beliefs that writing is a stream of thought or a conversation written down, not an entity in its
own right.Since we don't edit oral monologues or conversations, the role of editing in
computer-generated writing was also called into question. Nowhere has this fact become more
evident than in the use of email.
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