Number 1: for the week of Thursday, January 21, 2010

My dear readers,

Overall the articles for this week give the impression of composition studies as a field only just now in the last few decades coming into itself and beginning to attain self-knowledge. Moreover several articles, notably Introduction, with its historical overview of what the American college experience used to be like, shows both the relative youth of the field and that not everyone has always agreed on what the discipline should follow.

What is composition studies, and what should it be? That is what I kept hearing repeated again and again in one form or another throughout the articles we read. Mind you, that question, for most of American intellectual history, could be better phrased as what is a proper university education and what should it do? In other words, should composition studies, whether called rhetoric, composition, or just plain old English, have a traditional academic focus, concerning itself only with a small minority of the population who have attended the right prep schools and been exposed to certain masterworks to the conscious exclusion of many other types of knowledge? Or should composition studies and education in general try to embrace all comers regardless of their previous experiences?

Hill struggles with this even before the much lauded inception of the Harvard model which based on German principles of lecture, free inquiry, and academic self determination through electives and individual disciplines was meant to improve upon the pre-1860 American model which privileged orality and rote memorization over the modern idea of written expression of ideas. Of course, as we read although orality was clearly supreme at Yale in 1766 and North Carolina Chapel Hill in the early 19th century writing did get done. The important thing however was the focus on the content of the writing was based almost entirely on classics, either Greco Roman or English, which most of the wider American population never encountered regularly.

Although the Harvard model was seen by many as an improvement over the old American system where college presidents could spoonfeed their small student bodies virtually any mix of religion and classics that they personally felt comfortable with, the eventual Harvard entrance exam, based as it was only a few major literary works, probably excluded as many or more of the type of students Harvard wanted and could have benefited from, as it allowed in. This is because even today no one can be exposed to everything. That is the question then. Who or what should be privileged in academia? Also, who gets to define whether a particular population of students is literate or not?

Today classroom populations at all levels are more diverse than ever. Yet the old guard gatekeepers of academia are just as homogeneous, by and large, as they were when Elliott took charge at Harvard. In other words, there is a disconnect between the traditional academic elite and members of new student populations wishing to participate in academia. This can include minorities, women, and those with physical impairments. Traditional academia makes no provisions for these groups because all else being equal it would rather not deal with them.

In Yancey's article she talks about the democratization of reading and 19th century Britain new forms particularly newspapers allowed more people to share an experience more ideas than ever before. I can only imagine that scared the hell out of the traditional pillars of British society. According to Yancey the same sort of thing may be beginning today with the emergence of electronic media e-mail personal homepages Facebook and so on. Today, just as in 19th century Britain more people are mattering in a true intellectual sense of being able to grapple with and analyze the world around them without the mediating influence of their social betters than ever before. Unfortunately, it does not surprise me that traditional authorities like secondary education are nervous about this. Of course they would be, this is a form of discourse they cannot control. This is a part of society they cannot polish up and place in a glass case for display to the world as proof of their own glory and effectiveness.

Rightly or wrongly, when I hear teachers at any of the levels I have taught at the moment their students cannot write effectively, I cannot help thinking that every teacher of writing inevitably says that as if they were the first person to receive such a revelation. Do we as writing teachers only say that because we are frustrated that our students have not had the sort of experiences that we had with writing, those kinds of positive experiences which made us want to become writing teachers in the first place? The same type of question enters my mind when I read the re-examination of the study by Durst. Please understand, the conclusions drawn both in the study by Durst, and the re-examination about 15 years later are not necessarily what troubled me. I don't have any problem with what they did simply with the gap they never thought of. They define their groups simply by age. To me this is insufficient just because someone is over age 18 and therefore considered an adult are we supposed to believe that everyone's experiences are the same regardless of demographics geographic location presence or lack of some physical impairment etc. I say no, and I see a study which does not take these other factors into account in the same way that I see the entrance exam to Harvard in Elliott's time as at best excluding information and talent it could make better use of, or at worst hiding its head in the sand to the realities of a changing world.

Yours truly,

James Altman