Some Reminders

While the Zuboff and Maxmin book is fascinating and insightful, in reading it I sometimes find myself forgetting why I find economic concerns so essential to how I think about writing instruction and its intersection with technology. In a recent edition of James J. Murphy’s A Short History of Writing Instruction, I found some reminders. The book’s final chapter is by Catherine Hobbs and James Berlin, and deals with twentieth-century writing instruction. In the chapter’s second paragraph, Hobbs and Berlin write that “education in a democratic society is a site of contestation over the kind of economic, social, and political formations we want schools to endorse” (248): certainly a familiar argument, but one worth remembering. What I find more interesting (although it’s something I had begun to understand from the brilliant work of Raymond Williams) is their assertion that “The modern high school and the modern comprehensive university took their shapes as part of an economic shift from a laissez-faire market economy of unbridled individual competition to a managed economy of corporate and government alliances and planning” (249).

From the history of economics, I’m not sure such a truly “laissez-faire market economy” has ever existed, and while the Keynesian “managed economy” was certainly dominant for most of the twentieth century (even Milton Friedman said, famously, that “We are all Keynesians now”), much of contemporary economic thought seems set on a further turn towards that “unbridled individual competition”: I don’t contest the observation made by Hobbs and Berlin, but merely wish to complicate the historical perspective from which they make it. They suggest that “Education in general, and the new formation of English, played a central role in this transition” (249), and I think that English — and writing instruction in particular — will continue to play a central role in the ongoing move towards a (perhaps post-capitalist) new economy of distributed production and consumption. (Note to self: OK, Mike, work on explaining how this happens.)

Part of the explanation I’m seeking in that final parenthetical can be found in Hobbs and Berlin’s observations that at the end of the twentieth century, “Tensions over escalating demands for literacy accompanying global capitalism and developments in global communication and information technology continued to increase emphasis on literacy” (282), and that “Most governmental and business support of electronic literacy is geared to workplace writing to improve global competitiveness in the marketplace” (287). Yet as important as they make these issues seem, the four quotations I give are the only places in the chapter where they explicitly address economic concerns. Of course, it would be ridiculous (and rude) for me to fault Hobbs and Berlin for this: they’ve compressed the history of a century of writing instruction into forty-two pages, and in such a space, there’s only so much one can address. The nod they give toward economic issues in writing instruction is more than most composition scholars offer, but it’s also a gesture that reminds me of the attitudes Charles Moran has noted on the part of compositionists towards C. Paul Olson’s landmark essay on computers, economics, and education: many seem to say, “Oh, Olson has already talked about this, so I can acknowledge his work in a sentence and consider the issue closed.” While I’m glad to see the recent increase of interest in economic and class issues in the pages of College English and CCC, much of the discourse therein strikes me as largely referential rather than analytical. (Note, for example, that from those who have mentioned economic issues, we have yet to see a single explicit acknowledgement that there are multiple ways — neoclassical, Marxian, Austrian, neo-liberal, Chicago, et cetera — of thinking and talking about the economy.)

Of the compositionists who do explicitly grapple with economic issues, those associated with “working class” concerns are most prominent. They talk about economic inequalities, about the ideologies of capitalism, and about what it means to be “working class”. (I’m putting the term in quotation marks here to call attention to the fact that it’s freighted with multiple and often conflicting nuances of meaning, and also to the fact that I don’t always understand how it’s being used by a particular writer, or think that a certain usage is helpful.) Many working-class pedagogues, when they aren’t relying upon the essentialized rhetoric of the authentic lived experience of the working class, or blaming working class students for turning their backs on their backgrounds, name themselves as “critical” pedagogues and devote themselves to showing students how to unmask the ideologies of capitalist American culture. The problem is that this is a deficit model which stages students as stooges, waiting to be awakened to the higher critical consciousness possessed by the educator. Hardly different from Paulo Freire’s “banking model” of education, it’s a way for a teacher to say, “Follow me and I’ll show you how the world really is.” Such are the effects of a muddy rhetoric that has attempted to translate Freire’s Brazilian Christian Marxism to the United States while discarding the Marxism. The difficulty seems to be that while such scholars set economic inequalities as their central concerns, they name culture and ideology as the primary targets of their criticism, and use the authenticity of the lived experience of the working class individual as the starting point for their critique. Small wonder they can find no argumentative leverage: the need to go beyond the boundaries of individual experience and authenticity in order to discuss the complexities of a society’s economic interactions leaves many speechless. And this is the reason I’m doing this research, because I believe compositionists need an awareness and a vocabulary with which we might discuss the ways economic concerns affect our discipline, without having to fall back on the tired and essentialized rhetoric of individual authenticity.