National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition

What Will the Yard Sales Say?

What Will the Yard Sales Say ? My late colleague, Patrick Hartwell, liked to acquire old composition textbooks. As he visited country rummage and yard sales and flea markets , he found great, old texts. From John Franklin Genung’s (1891) and Fred Newton Scott and Joseph Villiers Denney’s textbooks (1897, 1909), to rhetorics, such as Alexander Bain’s (1890), Pat collected history. In Writing and Reality, James Berlin (1987) wrote that one can tell a lot about a society, including its history, by studying its rhetorics. Pat Hartwell knew this, too. Now imagine a scenario in which a rhetorician of the future goes about the task of searching out and collecting composition textbooks from our time. I hate to think what the yard sales of the future will say about us. I fear that they will tell the story of a nation that valorized one rhetoric, a study in which the teachers of writing in our time were neglectful of the existence of rhetorical traditions other than the dominant one. Worse, they will say that to be so ignorant, or, in some sense, arrogant at this late date in human history was folly at best, racist at worst, destructive in total. How is it possible to think otherwise? We still have a chance to intervene in this future. We compositionists can find ways to break down the doors of the cages of nationalism that have kept us locked in our provincialism—and racism. We need to learn what holds us back; we do not yet know what is possible; we need to figure out what we still could write. ...