ABSTRACT

Is anyone surprised to learn that first-year college writing has provoked a long “tradition of complaint” as Leonard Greenbaum called it some thirty years back? One early complaint came in 1912 from the first President of the NCTE, Edwin Hopkins. Unhappy with the workloads of writing teachers, Hopkins entitled his lead article in the premier issue of The English Journal, “Can Good Composition Teaching Be Done Under Present Conditions?” He answered his own title question with a single word that began his essay: “No.” Unfortunately, Hopkins’s complaint was never resolved, insofar as “overwork/underpay” still dominate the field, which began in the 1880s with writing teachers “oppressed, badly paid, ill-used, and secretly despised” (Connors “Overwork/Underpay” 108). On this cracked foundation, a formidable empire of writing instruction grew, with Harvard first imposing a written entrance exam in 1874 (failed by half the students who took it), first offering freshman comp in 1885 (which became the only required course there by 1897), and first recording a “literacy crisis” in 1894 (when Harvard student writing was assessed after a decade of comp) (Berlin, Writing Instruction; Ohmann, 1995)

In this chapter, I argue that the tradition of complaint emerges from social contradictions undermining the majority of writing students and teachers. My argument takes Galbraith’s advice seriously, that the economy drives educational policies, practices, conflicts, and outcomes. To connect writing instruction to economics, I make four claims about the traditional language arts dominating mass education in the past century:

1. Writing instruction’s focus on correct usage and academic discourse actually represents a political process where the social construction of people and the larger culture is at stake.