Composition: History & Theory: 1940 - 1949
The General Education Movement
Description
In Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 (1987), James Berlin claims that the general education movement, emphasizing acculturation and citizenship, dominated college curricula between 1940 and 1960. This movement combined expansive “liberal learning” concepts and restrictive “professional specialization” to democratize education (92). A major general education component that emerged during this time, communications courses, greatly influenced writing instruction. Communications courses, influenced by General Semantics’ positivistic, scientific empiricism and structural linguistics, including concepts such as the “ladder of abstraction,” “consciousness of abstraction,” and “figures of speech,” overlapped with and strongly influenced rhetoric and composition courses (94). The communications course was interdisciplinary; writing, speaking, reading and listening were taught together, using an “interdepartmental” faculty that resulted “in a more efficient use of faculty” (96).
Berlin compares and contrasts characteristics of communications courses at State University of Iowa and the University of Denver, after which communications courses across the country were patterned. Some highlights from Berlin’s discussion of educational developments in this time period include the following: Korzybski applied scientific empiricism to language study; Hayakawa applied General Semantics to composition; Hackett considered “language as a mode of social behavior” that defined reality (95); Iowa’s communication studies/composition courses were skill-centered rather than context centered with an emphasis on modes, tests, and the study of literature rather than the production of it (current traditional); and Denver’s communication studies/composition courses emphasized “life adjustment” in a system that saw writing problems as directly linked to psychic disorders with the writing teacher acting as a clinician or therapist (there were no tests, literature was produced rather than studied, and, in social epistemic fashion, knowledge was seen as dialectical) (99-103).
Date of Upload
3/13/09