The Berlin-Hairston Axis

Just trying to help Chad out--now he's not the only one punning on Jimmy's name.

When asked some time ago (on one of those notecards that prof.s hand out on the first day of a class) to list books that have infuenced me, I included Friere's _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_. As Berlin bases much of Part 3 on Friere, I think the notecard serves as a good shorthand for telling where I land on the Berlin-Hairston continuum, but I'll go one further.

To the list of "revealing quotations" that Hairston includes by those who assert "that they have not only the right, but the duty, to put ideology and radical politics at the center of their teaching" (180), I'll add one more:

"Ever since George Orwell… it has been commonplace of social criticism that whoever controls language controls the way we think and act. With the massive expansion of American democratic education in this century, school and college English teachers have considerable opportunity to shape the way young Americans talk, write, and think about the world. That is no doubt why the teaching of English and the humanities has become a major battleground in the recent war over culture.

In fact, the student movement of the sixties owed much of its inspiration to the widespread teaching of texts like 'Politics and the English Language' in the expanding freshman composition programs of postwar American college and universities. It was in freshman comp that a generation learned from Orwell, Thoreau, Baldwin, and other essayists to contemplate the gap between hypothetical American ideals of justice and equality and the observable realities of racism, exploitation and militarism."

After listing *her* contentious quotes from James Laditka, Charles Paine, Patricia Bizzell and C. H. Knoblauch, Hairston goes on to list "Some names you might look for" in the journals if you want to find "similar sentiments" (181--she's compiling a blacklist!) and, sure enough, she includes Richard Ohmann. The quote I give above is from that foreward Gerald Graff wrote for Ohmann's _English in America: A Radical View of the Profession_ that I mentioned in class last week. I've used that quote before because it articulates for me why I've felt like a fellow traveller to "the literary critics who are at the center of power in most English departments" (179--and I know that this is no longer the case, really, but it actually makes my point nicely because I personally would feel more at home in such an English department). That is to say, I agree with Graff's assessment, and I think the "tenured radicals" were onto something--and I think what they were onto is relevant for composition and rhetoric. We as a culture have stated values and assumptions, many of which are encoded into our educational system (of which rhet/comp is a part). Therefore, I would say that the classroom is already political in as much as *everything* is political, no matter how many eyes roll when that assertion is made.

Hairston is hardly the first to bemoan the "rise of theory." The same criticism was made *of criticism* in regards to its applications to literature, of course. Many have called for the exorcism of theory from literature studies, replacing with "literature for literature's sake" position. But what is true of criticism and theory in literature is true of rhet/comp: that is to say, arguing for "literature for literature's sake" *presupposes* a definition of what literature *is*, an epistemological aesthetics that is anything *but* free of theory. So when Hairston asserts "that we teach writing for its own sake," I'm skeptical. Rhet/comp students are immersed in the culture of the United States (whether it be the Ideological State Apparatuses of Althusser's theory or good old hegemony of Gramsci's). They attend universities and colleges that already have curriculums, set goals and discourses for instruction, measurement and success (not to mention the fact that universities are now largely run on business models, where students are "customers" and cost-effectiveness and what I would loosely call "profits" are main goal). If rhet/comp focuses on "writing as a way of learning," then what's wrong with it first presupposing that students arrive in the classroom with a politic, one that must be actively engaged whether or not you're teaching them *just* how to argue for the views they already have, or if you wish to try and get them to think (and read, and write) *critically* as a way of learning?