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113 3 Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College The classroom is the place for the pupil to learn how to use his own powers, and if the teacher usurps this, he is the meanest of tyrants—a tyrant over human souls.—William Mayo Every lesson learned in the school is more or less a lesson in English.—William Mayo At first glance, William Leonidas Mayo would not likely be a welcome figure at a contemporary convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). His classrooms were anything but decentered, and he would have scoffed at the idea that students had a right to their own language—unless that language was Standard English. The maverick founder and president of East Texas Normal College (1889), an independent teacher-training institution in rural Commerce, Texas, ruled his school with unquestioned authority, boxing unruly students about the ears, sending others home for rule infractions, and insisting upon exacting standards for English instruction. Whole weeks at the campus could be spent in debate on the finer points of prescriptive grammar, and woe to the student who used the subjective case where the objective case was required, in class or out. At the same time, Mayo advocated many practices that anticipated contemporary, student-centered, civically engaged pedagogy; he held that students’ changing needs should drive curricula, that each student had a sacred dignity that schools must uphold, that practical, universal education was the basis for a 114 Challenging Orthodoxies democratic society, and that no student should be turned away for lack of academic preparation or funds. As a normal school educator, Mayo was at once mainstream and iconoclastic . In his pedagogy, he combined elements of rugged individualism, populist politics, progressive educational ideals, Methodist discipline, and a late-Victorian faith in self-improvement. His motto was “Ceaseless industry , fearless investigation, unfettered thought.” He tailored his institution to the needs of the local agricultural community, with no formal admissions requirements, minimal tuition, and ten-week terms, which allowed students to come and go as finances and farm work allowed. He had little use for what he considered the “aristocracy” of academia and little patience for the administrative rules of the state Board of Education. As the school catalogue annually declared: • Board of Regents—None. We use no names of distinguished politicians or other men of high-sounding titles for mere catch-traps. • Board of Trustees—None. No such dignitaries to hold us in suspense for weeks or months when we wish to make the slightest change or needed improvement. • Board of Directors—None. We are not check-reined by such a body of men, who know far less about school work than about the business they follow, and who are ever ready to suggest ideas prevailing “when I went to school.” • Board of Visitors—Everybody. Who desires to attend college, or who has a son, a daughter, or a friend anxious to acquire, under the most favorable conditions, a general practical education at a minimum outlay of time and money. (Catalogue 1905 2) Although not initially accredited—indeed, Mayo opposed accreditation— East Texas Normal quickly became an important training center for teachers . By 1907, its summer teacher’s program was the state’s largest (Goodwin 41); by the time of Mayo’s death in 1917, yearly enrollment had reached three thousand, and the school had long had the largest summer enrollment of any Texas institution save the flagship University of Texas1 (Bledsoe 49–50). Mayo’s graduates formed an important part of the professional class of East Texas in the first half of the twentieth century, and he was long remembered after his death for providing educational opportunities to thousands of ambitious rural students who would have otherwise been unable to attend college because of limited funds or inadequate previous schooling. Challenging Orthodoxies 115 Mayo is a figure worth studying for several reasons. First, as the founder of a normal school, he represents a neglected part of the legacy in rhetoric and composition studies; normal school educators played an important role in the NCTE in the early twentieth century and actively contributed to discussions in the English Journal.2 Not only did normal schools, or teachertraining colleges, descend from a different intellectual tradition than liberal arts colleges, their advocates explicitly defined themselves in opposition to liberal arts colleges, which were frequently perceived as part of a conservative and even antidemocratic educational establishment. Normal school educators held that schools must be accountable to the communities...

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