Myers, Greg. “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition

Myers, Greg. “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching”
“Schools not only teach academic knowledge, they teach work according to schedule, acceptance of authority, and competition among individuals and between groups” (439).
[about Leonard] “But the most important influence on him and an important influence still on composition theory, was the work of John Dewey. It was from Dewey that Leonard took his central theme—and the theme of most importance to us in trying to criticize his work—the idea of the school as an image of society” (441).
“The danger is that the teacher has merely embodied his or her authority in the more effective guise of class consensus. This guided consensus has a power of individual students that a teacher can not have alone” (442).
So, we take authoritative “pressure” off the students, authority in the guise of instructor, and place them under peer pressure. Geeze.
“By treating the ‘real world’ as the bedrock of our teaching we perpetuate the idea that reality is something outside us and beyond our efforts to change it” (445).
“If what we think of as facts are determined by our ideological framework, the facts cannot themselves get us beyond that framework” (445).
“His demand that development in school lead to the world of work and community responsibility, while it frees the school from the empty formalism of lectures, drills, and theme topics, ironically makes it more subservient to ideology” (446).
“For Leonard, as for Dewey, to criticize the subordination of education to the needs of business and government is to fail to face reality” (446).
“All these associations, whatever the pedagogical value of the materials they propose, beg the question of just how we come to define a real world, and accept that world as something given” (447).
“I have questions about the way these reformers define themselves against the dubious practices of traditional teachers, who are often at a lower level of the hierarchy of educational prestige” (447).
“Thus in each generation it is the reformers who chair committees, write articles, and edit the journals; by these standards it is the reformers who are the establishment and the opponents they label traditionalists are the outsiders” (448).
“What is needed to break this circle is more understanding of the conditions under which people teach, and the ideological frameworks within which they think” (448).
“For Elbow, as for Leonard, power over real audiences comes from an immediate connection with reality gained through a breaking down of stifling conventions” (449).
“The problem with this call for direct experience of reality is that, as with Leonard, one must ask to which reality is one admitted” (449).
EXCELLENT QUESTION!!!!!!!!
“analysis of the social conditions of our writing” (450). Good idea.
“He refers often to his own internal struggles in writing the book. I would argue, though, that its rhetorical power comes not from these struggles, but from its place in a group of texts” (450).
“My point is that both Elbow and I write within discourses developed in social processes, and that his account ignores these processes” (450).
“If we turn a blind eye to social factors we are likely merely to perpetuate the provision of different kinds of knowledge for the rich and the poor” (452).
“This stance requires a sort of doubleness: an awareness that one’s course is part of an ideological structure that keeps people from thinking about their situation, but also a belief that one can resist this structure and help students to criticize it” (454).
I like the way this guy thinks, but boy is he a boring writer.