Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Dec 6, 2009, at 6:48 PM, Mike Beggs wrote:
>
> > I think she was always on the
> > traditionalist side of education policy, i.e. focusing on Great Books
> > etc,
>
> A POV I'm not entirely unsympathetic with, I gotta say.
Since the mid-70s, almost without exception, the word "reform" has meant "Let's try to destroy any decent developments over tht last 40 years." (Maybe someone could condense that into a useful slogan"?d) There's no doubt testint etc is pretty destructive. (But oppositon to it, and defense of whatever is traditional, is a practical matter, and those carrying it out should not fool themselves into thinkign the 'old' ways were all that wonderful. That said,I'm going to defend one of the 'old ways' in a particular area -- freshman comp.
Now it was always a shuck. See Richard Ohmann's English in America. It isn't really possible to teach writing. But in their unorganized sloppy way, taught mostly by grad students or junior faculty who were't really interested;, they were in fact something fairly wonderful. They were sort of 'ouside' the formal organization of educaton. They were just 50 minutes a day 3 times a week when 20 or so students and an instructor, at least some of the time and often quite a bit of the time, sat in a room and chatted with each other about almost any fucking thing that came to mind. It was corrupted of course by the necessity usually thought as worthwhile of grading people on their writing, and judging their intelligence by that. That is about as intelligent as judging people by how well the wiggle their nose or maintain perfect pitch in singing a capella or how well they can paint a still life. But that's the whole education system, and it can't be fundamentally changed, so the freshman comp classes on the whole were a plus.
Then "Composition" back in the'80s became a discipline. They give Ph.D.'s in theory of compositon. They organized the class. They set criteria. They got sderious about judging writing. The demanded portfolios of students. Often tey even introduced a university writing proficiency examination a required for graduation. And all the people who did this and are doing this were really conscientous liberals who really thought they were doign good. The system didn't impose it on them; they invented it and made the system do it to them, which the system did with glee (if a system can be gleeful).
Now we have organized armies of control who got into them because they liked to read and write and thogught they would like to be Ph.D.s in English and discuss great ideas.
Hence the unreformed system, as corrupt as it was, was much much better. But don't romanticize it. Don't think anyone in it was into makign a bettyer world. They were jsut people who liked to read and write and thought it would be nice to be a college prof and tried to do what they could along the way that seemed decent. Just like those teaching corporate compositon today.
Carrol