ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author suggests that many of our students are catechised, drilled into producing a certain sort of the work. He considers the online writing environment and William Burroughs’ notion of language as a virus. The author recognises that teachers of creative writing need to consider their position, too. Advocates of catechisms described them as examples of the Socratic dialogue. There is a tradition of these in the English children’s education that went back to the Elucidarium of the Honorius Augustodunensis, a 12th-century encyclopaedia. While the Bell-Lancaster monitor system resembles the disciplinary logic of the factory, it is the social catechism that Lorentzen discusses and Dickens and Wordsworth warn of that more resembles the logic of control. Finally, the author discusses the chapter’s themes of catechism and control in relation to breaking the silence and creative writing pedagogy.
