Between 1920 and 1940, the dominant trends of writing educated vacillated between individual and social objectives, each building off ideas of progressive education, that is, using science to study human behavior and promote the social good.
Attempts to quantify human behavior in order to shape curricular policy lead to widespread assessment. Berlin uses two university surveys to illustrate pedagogical trends in freshman composition. Generally, rhetoric textbooks disappeared, and administrators sectioned students by ability.
Berlin next looks at current-traditional rhetoric in this period, using Syracuse’s curriculum as a standard. Students were sectioned off with the best writing about literature, the standard writing research papers and about language, and the worse not writing themes at all but instead learning about spelling and grammar. With literature at the forefront, reading took a privileged position over writing.
In contrast, Berlin looks at liberal culture rhetoric, an elitist instruction for future literary genius in mind. Expressionistic rhetoric, influenced by psychoanalysis, grew from liberal culture. Expressionist Teachers did not assess writing but created instead conditions for students to reach their creative potentials.
Social rhetoric turned toward communal and political concerns. Writing education should teach citizenship and allow for a dialogue between people about controversial or relevant. Language is a social instrument, and correct usage is a matter of social context.
Berlin ends with two viewpoints condemning college writing. One suggests that courses made no difference in the quality of writing, and the other explains that new students had nothing to write about so writing classes should come in the last year of school. Of course, writing instruction remained part of college curriculums going into the 1940s.
Quotes
"[Progressive Education] was likewise concerned with the school serving the well-being of society, espeically in ensuring the continuance of a democratic state that would make opportunities available to all without compromising excellence" (59).
"Placement tests were multiplying and ability sectioning was becoming widespread. At the same time, rhetoric textbooks were being abandoned while literature was increasingly being introduced into the course. Finally, English clinics were being established--places where students who had completed the freshman composition requirement could go for assistance with their college assignments" (64).
"The minimal essentials were a placement test, grouping students by ability, and some sort of procedure for verifying the success of the program, such as exit tests or follow-up programs for students who later displayed shortcomings" (65).
"Theirs was an effort to democratize college, making it available to a new group of students, even students whose parents had not benefited from higher education" (68).
"It is obvious that these current-traditional programs were including those features of progressive education that were compatible with their positivistic epistemology" (69-70).
"Their effect, Bower explained, had been to make freshman composition a course in reading rather than writing" (71).
"The proponents of liberal culture, on the other hand, looked upon the university as the preparatory school for an elite, aristocratic group of individualists" (71).
"The origin of [liberal culture] can instead be found in the postwar, Freudian-inspired, expressionistic notions of childhood education that the progressives attempted to propagate" (73).
"[Adele] Bildersee explained: 'The aim of the book is to guide students in learning how to write. During twenty years, more or less, of experience, the teacher who writes the book has learned this: that the art of writing cannot be taught; it can be only be learned. The part of the teacher can play in this process is that of guide and advisor--collaborator if need be' (ix)" (77).
"As the thirties brought its increasing store of human misery, the attention of composition teachers became more clearly focused on writing as a response to social contexts" (82).
"Taylor argued for the teaching of writing in a way that would serve the political role of the individual in a democratic state" (86).
"Correctness or incorrectness in thought and usage is determined by the social context in which language is used, not by predetermined and fixed standards" (89).
"According to [Oscar James] Campbell, students could not write because they had nothing to say, and the only solution was to fill the void" (90).
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