I know about the empty formulas and the tomes of wasted words. Just the other night, I tried reading a book of literary criticism so awful it left me gasping for air. But this is not to say that there does not occur -- once in a great while -- a great work. A great work in pedagogy: Montessori; a great work in philosophy of language: Dante's "De Vulgaria"; a great work in sociology: Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class"; a great work in psychology: Winnicott's stuff.
Freshman composition is an attempt to give kids practice writing college papers. It's not very well taught; normally, it's just a place where graduate students can practice their postures and sadism. It's also a place where you get used to writing a lot, and practice usually helps. It could be a much better class, but that would require better teachers and better writers simply teaching what they love, and it would require that those teachers had some kind of experience outside of school.
Composition has become a discipline because we are afraid of actual consciousness and of actual change and imagination. Also because that has been the overall drift in education: professionalization along the lines of the "scientific" model, itself the product of ideology rather than actual practice. I do think you can teach people to write, just like you can teach them to dance, to draw, to play an instrument, or to speak a foreign language. Some are more gifted than others. Some are more interested than others. But it's not a dark art and it's not simply inborn. One reason why the bad writers keep being bad and the good writers stay good is because of the way education happens; it mostly reinforces whatever sense of self the student has. It doesn't open doors; it closes them. That's because it is largely a credentialling system that has nothing to do with learning.
I gave up a life of teaching and it was heartbreaking.
Joanna
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