Reading Jim Berlin’s monograph on nineteenth-century composition pedagogy (Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges), I recognized one of the struggles I’ve been having with my dissertation—with, that is, the point of it all. Berlin notes that as current-traditional rhetoric took root in the 1880s and 90s, figurative language, which had (almost) always been part of rhetorical analysis, fell less under scrutiny in rhetoric and more under the domain of literature departments—or the growing literary impulse in language departments. Rhetoricians and composition instructors were left, if they wanted to analyze language, with attending to grammar and usage. At the same time, the rise of the elective system nearly abolished the demand for classical languages, long the claim of distinction for the educated class. What replaced this mark of distinction was consistent and standard usage of the prestige dialect (72). And as the importance of prestigious usage filtered into composition textbooks, authors began to prescribe grammatical rules with the “conviction of the scientist, unconscious that they are reporting a class bias, not a physical law” (73).

It’s the degree of consciousness that’s tripping me up. As I explain my dissertation to non-specialists, the standard’s source in class bias is really news; it may even need evidence. But for my dissertation, they’re not my audience. And my audience more or less knows that grammatical standards are largely class markers. Of course, it’s not like non-specialists aren’t influential in manifesting attitudes and passing judgments that participate in exclusion, etc. It’s not even the case that such attitudes and judgments aren’t informed by what these non-specialists have learned in school. Thus, such people operate under the classical (“false conscious”) definition of ideology: “they do not know it, but they are doing it” (as Marx writes in Capital). But since it is the case that language teachers—at least those in the conversations I’d like to enter—know about their responsibilities to dismantle such attitudes and judgments, we would expect the effects of such attitudes and judgments to die out. And yet they aren’t—and if complaints about who can and can’t put a sentence together are any indication, neither is students’ grammar successfully being standardized. So what gives?

Could it be that even in knowing that grammatical standards are class-based, we are enforcing them anyway? One of our cynical attitudes involves us admitting our awareness of just how arbitrary such standards are but insisting that if we want to help our students function in a world where such standards have purchase, we’d better teach them the standards. “Cynicism as a form of ideology,” then, no? We know full well what we're doing, and still, we do it anyway.