Abstract
This chapter critically considers the current field of Composition Studies (Composition) from a traditional historical perspective while acknowledging its role in the creation and maintenance of culture. Since my intention is to expose omissions in this traditional history in the next chapter, the history of Composition presented in this chapter is most commonly known as the traditional “Harvard” history because Harvard is the location where initial Composition courses are said to have been taught. Harvard, as the locus of Composition, is largely accepted as the dominant history of Composition.
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Notes
- 1.
This time period will be discussed in further detail in Chap. 5.
- 2.
See Foner’s “Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction” in The New American History.
- 3.
The parallel history of the normal school will be discussed in depth in the next chapter.
- 4.
As a result of the influence of the German university, of the impact of science, of the Morrill Act, and of a weakening faith in the credibility of the old faculty psychology, the 1870s saw the beginnings of extensive revisions in the traditional curriculum (Kitzhaber 17).
- 5.
Within five years after the act became law, 23 states had availed themselves of its provisions. These new state institutions, founded squarely on the notion that it was the responsibility of American colleges to offer a wider selection of courses than had been commonly available before, were very influential in breaking up the older pattern and in supplying a new one for the next century (Kitzhaber 12). This act funded educational institutions by granting federally controlled lands to the states. The mission of these institutions, as set forth in the 1862 Act, is to teach agriculture, military tactics, the mechanic arts, and home economics, not to the exclusion of classical studies, so that members of the working classes might obtain a practical college education. In 1890, this act was again enforced on the Confederate states, which began the creation of some of the well-known historically black colleges.
- 6.
W.E.B. Dubois was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1890s.
- 7.
“While German universities were approaching their peak in prestige and enrollment, there were in 1868–1869 only eight graduate students in residence at Yale, five at Harvard, and none at all at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, or the University of Pennsylvania” (Kitzhaber 13).
- 8.
“The entering student, [Eliot] said, ‘ought to know what he likes best and is most fit for. If his previous training has been sufficiently wide, he will know by that time whether he is most apt for language or philosophy or natural science or mathematics. If he feels no loves, he will at least have his hates (p. 14)’” (Eliot quoted in Kitzhaber 18).
- 9.
Titled “Rhetoric for the Meritocracy.”
- 10.
This distinction will be further explained in the next chapter. Heinrich Pestalozzi, the most influential European theorist, argued that “education’s aim was to ‘fit’ or adjust, all children to society and that all learning begins with the child’s perceptions” (Fitzgerald 231).
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Ruiz, I.D. (2016). Introduction to the Field of Composition: Politics from the Start. In: Reclaiming Composition for Chicano/as and Other Ethnic Minorities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53673-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53673-0_3
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