Here's a rather long summary of Lucille M. Schultz's The Young Composers: Composition's Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois UP, 1999).
Schultz shows us early on that 19th Century (primary, for the most part) education witnessed a number of changes: (1) many more students began attending educational institutions, (2) educators began to think in more sophisticated ways about the cognitive development of children and therefore about ways of educating children, (3) composition instruction really began to occur—whereas previously writing instruction had involved little more than handwriting, parsing, and copying sentences from memory, (4) as a result of 2 and 3, composition for primary school students moved from a focus on writing about abstract topics to thinking about practical topics, (5) which also signals that primary and secondary education were no longer intended for elite students to be trained for further education (for the ministry or law), but rather for citizenship, and (6) “regular practice” (32) became the pedagogical method of teaching composition. Of course, if 1 is a material condition that affected the process, so is the advent of stereotyping and other innovations in printing (between 1800 and 1850 [27])—which made the reproduction of textbooks far easier and cheaper, and hence, more affordable for students. And so textbooks began to proliferate.
In her second chapter, Shultz complicates the traditional history of composition instruction (as represented by Crowley and Berlin) that recognizes Richard Green Parker and George Payn Quackenbos as the important figures of 19th C. composition pedagogy. While it's true that those figures dominate the pedagogical landscape, they barely alter traditional instruction (from 18th C. British rhetoricians like Blair, Smith, and Whatley and their grammar school adaptations like John Walker’s Teacher’s Assistant), whereas pedagogues like John Frost, Charles Morley, and F. Brookfield move beyond an insistence on (1) memory of rules and grammar—emphasizing instead actual practice in writing, (2) limited estimations of children’s capacities—wherein memory and imitation was all students were thought capable of, and (3) a refusal to recognize composition other than “exposition, argument, and narrative [“classical stories rather than stories that would emerge from the writer’s life”].” As compensation, these authors taught no rules—or taught rules only after students gained practice in writing; offered assignments and prompts that asked for description of objects and scenes—a kind of demand that recognized young students’ adjusted levels of development; and began to ask for personal expressive writing.
In Schultz’s third chapter, “‘No Ideas but in Things,’” she traces the line between Pestalozzi and John Frost. First, however, she demonstrates the similarities between Pestalozzi and other Enlightenment pedagogical theorist like Locke, Rousseau, and Comenius (and through him, Bacon)—they all “shared a concern with tailoring education to coincide with the child’s developmental level” (63)—as well as their differences: Locke was more mechanistic in his view of the child’s mind; Rousseau was more interested in educating the elite, while Pestalozzi basically advocated an early form of vocational education. And they all followed Comenius’s theory that children learn best and first from their immediate, sensory interaction with objects. Frost, then, takes his cue from Elizabeth Mayo, whose Lessons on Objects he edited for an American edition (and published under the title Lessons on Things [1831]) (67). In the second edition (1835, re-titled Lessons on Common Things), Frost added 52 illustrations, many of which ended up in his own textbook, Easy Exercises in Composition (68). And Frost’s treatment of the illustrations in Mayo’s text and then in his own reveals him “making the move from teaching the child the qualities of an object to asking the child to use his or her experience as the basis for an essay” (71). Schultz continues by pointing out the traces of Pestalozzian pedagogy in upper-level textbooks; indeed, many assumed a pedagogy that was consonant with Pestalozzi’s “object learning” and stress on inference-based education from experience.
Of course, there’s the question of whether Pestalozzian pedagogy was a good thing, without “drawbacks or pitfalls” (78). As a heuristic, Schultz finds attention to everyday objects to be a useful inventional device. As a “formula,” it could lead to unthinking steps toward composition as a procedure. What I wonder is whether object-thinking necessarily leads to a desired type of invention. That is, if it’s focused on my experience of an object, this pedagogy seems rather self-focused. If, instead, it’s focused on everyday objects as amenable to research in ways abstract ideas aren’t, then the pedagogy is useful for teaching rhetoric/composition as discovery, as (John Gage would say) epistemology. But in that case, it needs to be coupled with instruction in listening(/observing), particularly listening to/engaging with others and their experiences with objects and ideas.
But to return to Schultz, her fourth chapter asks: What kind of work do the illustrations in the texts do? She begins by looking at the conditions of printing that made a real advance in engraving possible. Illustrations gained more resolution, and they came to be recognized as intellectual property—which is clear since after a certain point, they were signed and they ceased to serve merely as stock images, repeated from text to text. The importance of the illustrations is that, by serving as prompts to which students should respond, “they enabled textbook writers to move away from John Walker’s advocacy of ‘writing in your own words what you remember of a memorized text written by an adult’ and toward teaching students to compose original text” (93). One place illustrations were important was in Gallaudet’s school for the deaf, and the compositions we have from the ASD’s archives show students learning a second language with the assistance of Pestalozzian pedagogy of the experiential. But finally, Schultz wants to get to an analysis of the hegemonic (though she doesn’t use that word) implications of the visual. If visual representations could take children to (mediated) experiences of the other, then how those visuals were framed by an authoritative voice would determine how students saw the other (Schultz draws on John Berger and Jean Mohr here). She offers examples, for instance of how a scene of slaves working in the field was framed as a thought experiment about cotton and not about the slaves or slavery, but her real point is only the sweeping one that certain of the “dominant culture’s life and values” were emphasized and preserved by the use of illustrations. Of course, that’s not really news, and she doesn’t strive for a very nuanced reading of the different ways “lives and values” contributed to the maintenance of hegemonic order. In the end, however, she reminds us that the significance of the illustrations for her overall point is about pedagogic innovations: “they served as prompts for original writing and in so doing, they represented a self-conscious break with an earlier pedagogy based on memorization or abstractions” (106).
Next, Schultz examines student writing. Early on, she discovers, students indeed had been learning what the textbooks she documents reflect: a shift from the abstract and impersonal to the concrete and experiential. That is, the sample essays included in the kinds of textbooks she admires and wants to recover demonstrate this shift, whereas earlier textbooks had included sample essays that, when written by students at all, were topically foreign to the lives of most students. She also finds printed collections of winners of student writing contests, but aware of the limited use of such cherry-picked evidence (meant to demonstrate the best internalization of the lessons taught), Schultz consults other venues for student writing. She considers the “extracurriculum,” a concept she adopts from Anne Ruggles Gere, such as letters written from children to parents or siblings. She then considers the extracurricular category of student journalism. She claims to find sites of resistance, at least of playfulness, and indeed we find a different mode or genre from in-class essays. But the extent to which any resistance is effected—to which, that is, what amounts to irreverence does any work whatsoever—remains unexplored. And she’s aware that her evidence—from students who enjoy and probably excel at writing (given that they practice it relatively often)—is entirely nonrepresentative (of what the typical student was learning and producing), so it’s hard to know what this evidence does do, other than teach us what (at least) a few teachers taught and (at least) a few students learned.
Ultimately, Schultz wants to see in student editors’ and writers’ evaluative comments of other student writing counterevidence for the 1892 Harvard study that claimed students received inadequate training in composition (141). But of course what’s adequate—and even when we can know that what we call adequate instruction has helped produce adequate writing skills—is hard to pin down. If Schultz’s evidence points to the students’ evaluations involving more praise than the Harvard study’s evaluations, well, that doesn’t really tell us that the Harvard study authors were wrong and the students right (or vice versa). All it does tell us is that the students were thinking about writing as a skill they’d need (and need to demonstrate) in college—and a skill that they had been taught to value for that and other reasons. She ends her chapter by reminding us what her point has been: the story of 19th Century composition instruction is more complicated than we’ve thought. Hopefully, we get that now, and this chapter has provided more evidence of that thesis by way of reading student writing to ask if students learned the kinds of things teachers thought they were teaching—it would seem that some did.
Finally, in her conclusion, Schultz considers the question of what good “experience-based writing” is—beyond according more faithfully with children’s cognitive capacities. She puts it best here: the value of teaching experience as important for writing is that “as a discipline, we were taking our first steps toward an understanding that giving voice to experience can help us to interrogate the culture from which that experience springs” (162).
