The Philosophy of Contemporary Song

Lee Trepanier’s “The Compliant College Classroom” and Blake Smith’s “Against the Writing Center” are both recent diatribes against the current state of writing instruction at the college level. They make similar claims from different disciplinary perspectives: Trepanier is Chair and Professor of Political Science at Samford University while Smith is currently serving as a Fulbright scholar in North Macedonia who specializes in Western European History. They’re both deeply invested in writing instruction within the contexts of their fields (not uncommon in my experience, especially among historians), and they are equally dismayed at superficial attempts to professionalize writing instruction at the expense of… writing instruction. I would like to say initially that both make very good points, but that Smith’s essay sounds as if it was written from the perspective of someone inexperienced (at least at the time) in teaching college, at least college writing, which is confirmed by the fact that he’s relating an experience at the beginning of a four year postdoc.

Smith lets his inexperience slip in a few giveaways throughout his essay. For example, these lines reveal a few misunderstandings about teaching college writing.

Many of the colleges and universities where we work have writing centers with staff dedicated to building writing skills among incoming students. Students who have been through such programs ought to demonstrate a guaranteed minimum level of writing ability, leaving instructors in other courses free to focus on teaching their discipline-specific content without having to explain, yet again, the purpose of topic sentences. . . But my students were shockingly bad writers. A few could express themselves in clear enough prose that I could concentrate on their arguments, but something like 90 percent of them struggled to write a sentence that could be read aloud without embarrassment.

His two mistakes are in thinking that writing instruction should be, in principle, confined to first year writing (so he shouldn’t have to provide it in his own classes), and that first year writing instruction guarantees a certain minimum competence. These are likely related points in his thinking: at the least, he should not have to provide lower level writing instruction. Regarding a guarantee of certain minimum competence, I agree with his thinking in principle, but institutional structures and the nature of writing instruction aren’t set up to provide any guarantees. In my ideal world, all students would be perfectly placed in their writing courses, not just by level of competency, but by kind of need, so that instruction could be tailored for each different student group. But that’s never the case. Placement at level of competence is almost non-existent in many institutions, and at best awkward and coarse at most others, so as a result, students with widely differing levels of writing competence and instructional needs are all found in the same class. Instructors can’t do much but teach to the middle, leaving struggling students behind and boring the more advanced students.

Furthermore, growth in writing occurs as students read and write, but most students have to be rewarded for this work in order to do it. In practice, then, much of a student’s grade in a writing class are “easy” points, rewards for practice without strict evaluation. That waters down the grade students receive on strictly evaluative measures, or at least somewhat inflates grades, so that even though students do certainly experience growth in their writing ability over the course of the semester (if they do the reading and writing, of course — students who barely pass with a C will not show the same growth), their grade may not correlate well with their writing ability. Some institutions mediate this effect through final portfolios that are graded independently of the instructor, but few institutions will fail a student for a low grade on a portfolio if they have grades of A, B, or even just a passing C for their work throughout the semester.

Smith is also working with a paradigm of writing instruction that both isolates writing instruction from other disciplines and that fails to recognize interdisciplinary differences in expectations for writing: what is good writing in one discipline is bad writing in another. His description of these bad writing tics can certainly fall within disciplinary differences:

The students seemed to have all learned together a stilted, awkward, and at times painfully florid way of writing removed both from the rhythms of good prose and ordinary conversational English. 

A person used to writing for science, math, or engineering programs may well sound just this way when writing about humanities subjects. But this description also indicates other shortcomings in Smith’s thinking due to inexperience. The first is the belief that student writing styles are solely the product of their writing instruction. I would say instead that students’ writing styles are contextually and emotionally driven as well. Students often write this way because they’re trying to impress their teachers or sound intelligent, as Smith knows: “It was the voice of someone who wanted very much to seem smart but did not yet know how to do so.” And while his article illustrates that they’re trying to do so in the worst possible way, I’d like to emphasize that this style of writing is a conscious, though misguided, choice being made by these students. It matters that it’s a choice, and because it is a choice, we need to recognize that students don’t have just one style of writing.

In other words, Smith makes the mistake of thinking that because students write that way for him, they write the same way at all times and in all contexts. But that’s just not true. I once had a student who wrote awful prose that demonstrated all of the bad qualities Smith describes in his essay, including subject/verb agreement problems, but when I assigned a narrative essay to be written in short story form, her prose was beautiful, gripping, and lacked subject/ verb agreement errors. The problem with her writing wasn’t in her previous writing instruction, or in her current writing ability, but was the product of anxiety about the kind of writing she was expected to do in class combined with some misunderstanding of it. Smith’s problem is that he’s ascribing these writing habits to former writing instruction rather than to students’ misperception of their instructors’ expectations for their writing or to any other factors. I’m curious how his first assignments would turn out if he explained the kind of writing he expected on the first day of class and distributed a sample essay.

I would like to add that writing instruction can’t and shouldn’t be confined to English or Communications classes because writing is a skill, and skills only develop over an extended period of time through continual practice. You don’t practice scales for just three months and then play guitar like Jimmy Page, but you will see improvement in your playing — and your degree of improvement will be affected by natural talent, your learning curve, and your level of real commitment to growth. At one time Smith College, I have heard from a few of its graduates, required writing in almost all of its classes, including its math classes. Any version of a Writing Across the Curriculum model is a more fruitful model of writing instruction.

As Smith goes on, however, he provides some evidence supporting these assumptions, largely in his description of how writing centers think through student writing and how writing center consultants are trained:

The course was organized around graduate students’ acquisition of a bespoke jargon for analyzing undergraduates’ writing. Would-be writing instructors learned that a paper is a means of expressing a “point” through stages of argumentation — “stasis,” “destabilization,” “grounds,” “reasoning,” “warrant,” etc. They were trained to read introductions (called “indexes” in the course material) for keywords (“themes”) that could then be tracked throughout the rest of the paper (following “lexical strings”). 

His grousing about field-specific jargon is pointless because he ignores context: these are also students, and if we were to reframe these concepts in everyday language, he wouldn’t necessarily disagree with this approach to writing instruction, which is oriented toward coherence first. At the neglect of style, yes, which is his complaint. Possibly, but which style for which class? That question can only be answered in upper division courses. When I worked in a writing center as a student in the early 90s, writing center consultants were sent around to each department on campus to collect assignment instructions and general expectations for writing in that discipline. We created field-specific handbooks to guide writing consultants when helping students write for their different classes, which if they’re double majors, or mixing minors, or taking general education courses with upper division courses in different disciplines can be very different. A lab report isn’t written the same way as an English literature paper. In other words, he’s forgetting that these consultants are teaching college writing, which requires a variety of styles for a variety of classes.

But what Smith seems to most strongly juxtapose in his article is the idea of an “ordinary” or “natural” or “conversational” prose style with one that’s actually more (often awkwardly) self-conscious about its style. While I doubt that Smith would take issue with a well-written lab report that sounded like a lab report (no reading for pleasure there, however), he seems to expect all students to write well in the same way. He juxtaposes approaches to writing instruction that treat writing as a science with approaches to writing instruction that treat writing as a natural extension of human thought and speech. He is juxtaposing, in other words, Enlightenment views of writing with Romantic views, the former treating writing like a science, the latter treating writing as the natural work of people who are writers. 

But why can’t writing be both?

This juxtaposition also informs Lee Trepanier’s better-informed “The Compliant College Classroom,” originally published in a number of venues in mid-August 2022 but recently republished on his Substack. While he states the issue in different terms, he still presents a similar binary. Ken Bain’s “therapeutic education,” on the one hand, originates significantly in Rousseau:

The origins of this student-centered approach, with its emphasis on collaboration, independence, and self-discovery, can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who believed that the child’s mind should develop naturally rather than be molded by teachers and schools.

Rousseau’s theory of education is rooted in beliefs about childhood that locate the height of human existence in childhood, which then degenerates as the child gets older and is assimilated into civilization, a progress echoed in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations on Immortality”:

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
               From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
               Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
               He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
     Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
          And by the vision splendid
          Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Trepanier doesn’t use the term “Romantic,” but he’s describing a specifically Romantic view of childhood, one that originates in Rousseau and, in his account, has been passed down to us through John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and then contemporary educators such as Ken Bain. 

Trepanier opposes therapeutic education to the standardization of knowledge, a quantifiable approach to education which he describes in these terms:

To be economically successful students need to learn how to assemble, analyze, and manipulate data. Because it is considered “real,” everything is measured and quantified, especially given the ubiquity of technology in our society which makes counting things easier.

This numerical assignment and valuing of reality give the illusion of being objective and transparent—a phenomenon particularly attractive to democratic societies. As Tocqueville observed, democratic citizens rely upon their own individual judgements to make decisions and thereby reduce everything to its utilitarian value. But because everyone is equal in a democratic society, no one is certain that his judgment is better than anyone else’s, ultimately yielding a consensus ruled by the majority. Data, the standardization of knowledge, is the crystallization of democratic judgment because nobody can object to it: it claims to be objective, transparent, and equally accessible. 

Trepanier sees both kinds of education at work in US culture, of course. But most importantly, he believes both have their place; both are necessary. For example, he validates Enlightenment, quantifiable models of education here:

To be clear, there is nothing amiss when students learn how to assemble, analyze, and manipulate data in subjects that are amendable to it, like mathematics, the natural sciences, and aspects of the social sciences. 

while he validates Romantic models of education here:

Rousseau’s insight about students being at the center of learning is necessary for students to be independent and critical learners. Being able to draw one’s own conclusions because of one’s explorations brings a sense of joy and ownership to students.

He believes problems arise when only one model is held up as the gold standard for learning. To avoid this error, as a true classicist he recommends an Aristotelian “middle way” defined as “prudence”:

For Aristotle, prudence is a middle path between theoretical reason, which is too abstract to solve specific problems, and pragmatic calculation, which is focused only on what works without understanding why. It is a form of practical reason that is simultaneously connected with theoretical thinking to guide practical action. The best teachers embody this in their professions, teaching particular students in specific situations the enduring truths about reality. They are the bridges between the concrete and particular reality of students’ lives to the theoretical and abstract knowledge of their disciplines of knowledge. They are truly the “midwives” of truth.

Prudence is the preferred path in Trepanier’s thinking because it weds theoretical understanding with practical reason, encompassing both, benefiting from both, and offsetting the weaknesses of each in the process. His approach is superior to Smith’s because he has a broader view of what education should be: prudence would teach students when to engage in theoretical reasoning, how to apply theory practically, and it would grant students wisdom in their application of student knowledge. 

But I would like to suggest another model. Trepanier’s prudential model  — which, I should add, is still perfectly serviceable in the present — was most meaningful when the sum total of human knowledge was much smaller than it is today, when it was conceivable that a single person could master the arts and sciences. The model I would like to suggest can guide our broad conception of how education should work at the college and university level and, more narrowly, how we should think of student writing and writing instruction. 

The model I propose is a new liberal arts based on four areas of global competence: 

1. The human social environment, approached through humanities study and study in the human and social sciences.
2. The human physical environment, approached through study in the physical sciences directed specifically toward understanding our natural environment.
3. The human economic environment, approached through the study of business and economics.
4. The human technological environment, focused on competency in computer science and networks and in engineering fields.

The traditional liberal arts aren’t abandoned but distributed throughout this model. They serve as the basis of this model. 

Writing instruction, rather than being focused on a single model of “good” writing, is focused instead on putting students so in control of their own writing that they can modify their writing style as needed for different contexts and situations. Furthermore, writing instruction isn’t limited to early college classes or partitioned off into English or Communication departments. Instead, writing instruction, and all instruction really, is viewed organically: instruction begins with student placement at their level of competency and moves forward from there. Learning is a seed that’s planted in one class, watered in others, and then harvested far down the road.