The Politics of Composition: A Reply to John Rouse

Abstract

JOHN ROUSE'S ARTICLE ON The Politics of Composition, published in September 1979 issue of COLLEGE ENGLISH, illustrates predicament of thoughtful composition teacher today. If this teacher tries to inculcate standard conventions of expression, she is open to attack from critics of Rouse's persuasion for yielding to the overriding need to socialize these young people in a manner politically (p. 1). Over and over, we have been told by proponents of radical pedagogy that conception of good writing that guides standard composition course is little more than rhetorical and grammatical complement of capitalism, that forcing students to write by conventional models is a form of bureaucratic or managerial social control, that very encouragement of analytical modes of writing and thinking plays into hands of our technocratic masters, whose interests are served when analysis represses feeling. It is but a short step, these critics remind us, from a student's acquiescence to a composition assignment now to taking orders from boss later. Conformity to grammar is good preparation for conformity in all walks of life. So, according to Rouse, Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), because it seeks to impart rules and principles of writing and an of understanding writing, provides a program suitable for processing large numbers of young people in a way eminently acceptable to those who matter, who have power (p. 11). This equation of rule-oriented teaching and analytic method with processing, social control, repression, and robotization of student-and all these spectres are conjured up