The History of Composition: Reclaiming Our Lost Generations (Varnum)

...the sixty years between roughly 1900 and 1960 have been characterized as a period of stagnation in the history of composition and as a period in which "current-traditional" rhetoric, an approach developed in the late nineteenth century, operated as a monolithic and increasingly obstructive paradigm. (39)

Such characterizations of our history have the effect of denying the resources and lessons of portions of the past to many of us currently teaching composition. (40) 

 The way we see history affects the way we see our present field. (40) 

I would emphasize that we need to look at all of our history, including that of the first sixty years of the twentieth century, if we are to view writing and the teaching of writing from the full range of perspectives. (40) 

In addition to those in the "first generation" who struggled in the 1960s and 1970s to professionalize the teaching of composition and who thus have difficulty looking Objectively at the pre-professional history of the field, those historians who have relied narrowly on textbooks for information are especially guilty of promulgating the view that nothing much happened in composition between 1900 and 1960. Regrettably, according to Stephen North, most composition history to date has been based on textbooks or on previously published scholarship. Few composition historians have yet examined student texts, syllabi, or aSSignments, nor have they gathered oral material to any extent from teachers and students. North argues that textbook-based histories cannot tell us much about actual classroom practice (73-74). (40) 

On Berlin: Berlin's work is flawed, moreover, by his use of an epistemological taxonomy that operates as a powerful terministic screen and all too often dominates his narrative...Berlin takes little account of disparities within any individual's or school's approach, or of changes in that approach over time. The distortions thus created are all the more glaring because Berlin spotlights the categories he prefers. (41) 

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 The unfortunate result is that due to the influence of Kitzhaber and his followers on the one hand and of Young and Hairston on the other, the history of composition between 1900 and 1960 has remained largely unexamined. No one has catalogued the methodological alternatives which were available to teachers during this reputedly monolithic period. No one has accounted adequately for the first moves toward professionalization in the 1930s and 1940s. The phrase "current-traditional rhetoric" has become a terministic screen that no one has attempted to see through. (47) 

I believe the period is eminently worthy of renewed historical attention. In order truly to understand the history of this maligned period, however, historians will have to look beyond textbooks,and even beyond the professional literature of the period, for new sources of information. Oral material from teachers and former students is a rich potential resource.7 Syllabi, assignment sheets, dittoed handouts, student papers and teachers' responses to them, course and teacher evaluations, student journals, teacher's journals, letters, interdepartmental memos, and similar ephemera may also give us new views of writing instruction at earlier periods. (50) 

 Until such material has been considered, it is premature to conclude that current-traditional rhetoric was the dominant and all-pervasive rhetoric of the period. (50) 

I am interested in English 1-2, among other reasons, because the course used student writing as its text, because its students wrote from experience, because its instructors taught collaboratively, because it addressed the issue of writing in the disciplines, and because it seems very different from the kind of "current-traditional" course said to have been standard at its period. Other studies similar to mine of other early and mid-twentieth-century courses, if enough of them can be completed, may show that current- traditional rhetoric was not so monolithic nor composition theory and pedagogy so stagnant as textbook-based histories have indicated. We need to reclaim all our history, including the history during the period before our field achieved its current professional status, if we are to have any hope of solidifying our academic identity, answering detractors, evaluating the appeals of reformers, and guiding students and the profession wisely into the twenty-first century. We need to know where we have been in order to know who we are and where we are going. (51-52)