History of Reading News. Vol.XXIII No.1 (1999:Fall)
by Charles Bazerman

The Young Composers: Composition's Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools, by Lucille M. Schultz. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. pp. xiv, 218. Illustrations. Paper $14.95.

In examining primary and secondary schoolbooks of the mid-nineteenth century United States, Lucille Schultz un­covers little-known experimentation in writing pedagogy that prefigures much of what we think of as late twentieth-century composition innovations. She finds early examples of teaching writing through writing practice rather than rules, writing from personal experience, writing about eve­ryday life, using visual prompts for writing, and recognizing the value of writing for personal development. Since much prior scholarship on the history of nineteenth-century writ­ing pedagogy has focused on higher education, these early innovations have remained invisible to us.

Schultz suggests there was more experimentation in the lower schools because they were not tied, as universities were, to professional training for law and clergy and were not responsible for reproducing elite social distinctions. Primary and secondary schools, which provided democratic education for the middle class, were more connected to the needs and experiences of everyday life. With less responsibil­ity for transmitting canonical knowledge and more responsi­bility for the development of youth, innovators in the lower schools provided opportunities for students to write about themselves, their experiences, and the objects and events found in the world around them.

Among the innovative, but rarely examined, textbooks Schultz describes and analyzes are Richard Green Parker's Progressive Exercises (1832), Charles Morley's A Practical Guide to Composition (1838), John Frost's Easy Exercises in Composition (1839), Charles Northend's Young Com­posers (1848), Amos R. Phippen' Illustrated Composition Book (1854), and F. Brookfield's First Book in Composi­tion (1855). Schultz's volume contains much descriptive detail, giving a concrete sense of the look and content of the books, as well as of the kinds of schools they were used in. It is also copiously illustrated with pages from the text­books and the graphics used in the originals.

Schultz compares the innovations of these textbooks against the tradition of rule-based teaching of writing, such as in John Walker's prominent Teacher's Assistant (1801). She finds the roots of the student-based, concrete experiential pedagogy in the books she examines in the enlightenment tradition of Comenius, Locke, and Rousseau, which came together in the theories of the influential Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who put great emphasis on con­crete experience as the beginning of all learning. Frost in particular was heavily influenced by Pestalozzi, as indicated by his being the editor of the 1831 American edition of Elizabeth Mayo's Lessons on Objects as Given in a Pesta-lozzian School at Cheam, Surrey (1830). Frost added fifty-two engravings to the 1835 American edition to illustrate the Pestalozzian lessons; he then recycled many of these il-lustrations as the prompts for writing assignments in his 1839 composition textbook, Easy Exercises for Composi-

tion. The experiential character of the latter is revealed by its introduction of the "What I did in my summer vacation" essay assignment, fully 31 years prior to Connor's noting of the assignment in John Hart's 1870 Manual of Composition and Rhetoric. Personal writing was thriving in the pri­mary schools three decades before it emerged in higher education.

From The Young Composers, p. 95. Originally published in John Frost's Easy Exercises in Composition, 2^nd ed. Philadelphia: W. Marshall, 1839, p. 21.

In addition to examining the philosophic underpinnings and the practical pedagogy of these school composition text­books, Schultz reconstructs some of the ideological world the children were living in and the values that were being reinforced in the books. Despite the progressive writing pedagogies, the books reproduced common ante-bellum assumptions about race, class, and gender.

To get even closer to the practices and experiences of student writers, Schultz describes and analyzes other previ­ously unexamined sources--books of prize essays from sec­ondary school contests, student letters and memoirs, and student newspapers. These materials open up intriguing questions about official and unofficial writing, but unfortu-nately this part of the investigation is not developed nearly

as much as it deserves More such texts need to be ex-amined, as much as it deserves. More such texts need to be examined, more context needs to be given, and alternative sources (if available) should be developed. However, Schultz should be thanked for her expansive vision that directs our attention to these wider ranges of material. Her preliminary investigations of these materials invites follow-up studies of the practices, functions, texts and contexts of secondary writing competitions and even more of high school journalism. These extra-curricular forms of writing are often extremely powerful forms of learning to write, and have had an important role in U.S. schools, but as of yet far too little is known about them.

Despite the importance and interest of the materials and stories Schultz presents, some weaknesses of the presentation keep the argument from developing its full elaboration and force. Chapters are slow in getting started, material is frequently repeated as much as three or four times in the course of the book, the author too often touts the significance of the material rather than trusting the reader to make that judgment, and background material on Pestalozzi and his predecessors is not fully integrated into the discussion. Further, one would wish that the rapid connections made between these early innovations and current pedagogy were pursued more vigorously, slowly, and in greater detail.

This desire to have a stronger book is pressing only because Schultz has opened up such interesting chapters of the history of writing instruction and its connections with social forces and broad movements in pedagogic theory. Her book tells such an important story and opens up so many areas for future research, that it deserves the attention of anyone working in the history of composition, the history of literacy, and the history of schooling.

Charles Bazerman is Professor of English and Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His interests include history of literacy, rhetorical theory, writing across the curriculum, and disciplinary forms of writing. His most recent book is The Languages of Edison's Light.