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152 C O N C L U S I O N History Matters At the turn of the twentieth century, there were over a thousand institutions of higher learning in America;1 this study details just three of them. These histories are necessarily incomplete. But they are necessary. Indeed, in a country with such a decentralized educational system as the United States, national educational histories cannot be understood but in relation to the local communities in which trends both emerge and play out. For African American students and educators at Wiley College, the classical liberal arts tradition represented the pinnacle of academic achievement, while vocational education symbolized continued racial oppression. For rural white women at Texas Woman’s University, the situation was reversed; liberal arts education carried the weight of a circumscribed past, while vocational education symbolized a new era of expanded political and economic participation. At East Texas Normal College, meanwhile, William Mayo promised students an education superior to that of the traditional liberal arts college, which he mocked as hidebound and elitist. At Wiley, Melvin Tolson used race pride and the black oratorical tradition to inspire his students. At TWU, students and educators looked to the women’s movement and local women’s clubs for solidarity and support. At East Texas, Mayo played upon the pioneering, pragmatist spirit of his rural students to spur them to achievement. Such histories matter and not merely to historians but to teachers, administrators, policymakers, and the public. The perceived pedagogical failures and successes of the past and present shape the pedagogy of the future. If we, as instructors and scholars of rhetoric Conclusion 153 and writing, are to have a say in that future, we must be able to articulate a nuanced interpretation of our past. Our histories also tell us who we are. As John Brereton notes, scholars in rhetoric and composition commonly “defin[e] themselves by their relationship to their origins” (xi). In overlooking the wide-ranging practices at diverse sites of rhetorical education, we have missed an important chance to reconnect with the often-progressive roots of our field. On both the left and the right, observers of higher education have often been fixed on the ideological flashpoint of the late 1960s. Both conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and radicals, frequently look to this era as either the beginning of significant educational reform or the beginning of the end. In rhetoric and composition studies, this period marks the revitalization of the rhetorical tradition and the revolt against overauthoritarian and positivist pedagogies . But the reform tradition in American education—and rhetoric and composition pedagogy—goes much further back. A fuller understanding of previous waves of activist, populist, and reformist pedagogy better prepares us to set our current debates in their proper historical context. Just as any thoughtful contemporary writing instructor makes use of a variety of theories and practices, from expressivist to cognitivist, from positivist to postmodern, so did previous generations also have a rich repertoire of pedagogies to choose from. Long before writing process theory and postmodern critiques of the construction of knowledge, college English instructors in America sought to empower students through language instruction, link rhetorical instruction to democratic action, and develop locally responsive pedagogies that took into account the needs and desires of diverse communities. It is true that students and faculty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were less troubled about the negotiation of power and the imposition of dominant-class ideology through language instruction than we are. But they were not naive. Melvin Tolson and William Mayo, severe, disciplinary grammarians both, saw their work as radical. For Tolson, language instruction gave his students the tools to actively resist the pressures of racism, conservatism, and capitalism. The question of whether the master’s tools could be used to tear down or rebuild the master’s house never came up, as it never would have occurred to him that the tools belonged to the master in the first place. For Mayo, the teaching of writing, speaking, and grammar opened up a world of cultural and economic possibilities that would have otherwise been denied his students. As a normal school educator, he hoped to break the monopoly on cultural capital claimed by 154 Conclusion traditional—and often exclusionary and elitist—liberal arts colleges. At Texas Woman’s University, instructors sought to help students develop the communicative skills they would need in a society that was both still shaped by and breaking away from traditional roles...

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