A Sisyphean Task: Historical Perspectives on the Relationship between Writing and Reading Instruction. Technical Report No. 7.

“The mind has a thousand eyes,” and like Argus, education must look at life through every one of them! Mr. Hosic was the gallant Theseus who liberated distressed curriculum from this cramping limitation and made possible expansion and liberation of the materials of instruction. Given their classical educations, the first several generations of “modern” English language educators were more given than we are to view pedagogical reform in the terms of epic struggles. The two examples above were drawn from a 1936 publication of the National Council of Teachers of English, A Correlated Curriculum, which advocated the integration of writing, reading, speaking, and listening activities in the schools. 1 In truth, the battles to improve teaching and learning in the language arts were often mere skirmishes, the results neither victory nor defeat but stalemates. Sisyphus, not Hercules, is the hero of most school wars. To see this more clearly we now turn from Greek mythology to history, which is itself a tamer version of myth-making. History will give us better insight into the confounded and often cyclical nature of reform in education. The title chosen for this essay reflects that fact, using the imagery of the Corinthian ruler condemned to push a heavy object up a steep hill. His was a task with which teachers can readily identify. Clifford A Sisyphean Task 2 A SISYPHEAN TASK: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WRITING AND READING INSTRUCTION You are living during a time that in our profession will be known as the beginning of the most thoroughgoing revolutionary development in the teaching of English in the 20th century. What will you do? Whether you yourself participate in that revolution, catch the caboose as the train rolls by, or simply sit and watch–that is up to you. (Project English Curriculum Studies, 1964) This confident challenge was issued in 1964 by Professor Harold Allen of the University of Minnesota. It reminds one of another, equally confident prediction made during that same decade about the impending role of instructional technology: “Elementary, high school, or college teachers … who rely exclusively upon the teacher-centered lecture, demonstration, or explaining technique . . . now find themselves virtually expendable with the advent of television teaching” (Stiles, 1969, p. 44). Both men, of course, saw the events that they wanted to see and invested more vitality, or historicity, in them than proved warranted. These were, however, errors of judgment that we, too, will probably make about change in our own times. The closer integration of writing and reading instruction is presently a popular topic. In describing the trends that characterize reading research developments during the 1970s, Jeanne Chall and Steven Stahl (1982) point to an increased interest in the past two decades in writing and in the relationship between writing and reading. Janet Emig (1982), an active participant in that movement, states her conviction that that movement is appropriate and seemingly inevitable. She argues: For learning and teaching, writing and the other language arts cannot sensibly be regarded discretely and in isolation from one another. Reading impinges on writing, which in turn is transformed by listening and talking. Sponsorship of wholly autonomous research inquiries and curricular ventures into any one of the four language processes is now theoretically and empirically suspect. (p. 2031) Will assessments like Emig’s be sustained by future developments? Or, will some later historian of language education liken them to the fate of those early 1950s’ futurists who confidently predicted that every home would soon have its own helicopter pad? The Utilities of the History of Education The study of our past offers some protection against the danger of falling victim to a tendency to view the immediate events of one’s present as indicative of a trend. A trend is, ironically, only a mental construct used by historians and similar seekers after tidiness (Clifford, 1981). That fact explains why the past always appears more orderly than does one’s present. “History never looks like history when you are living through it,” John Gardner (1968) once reminded us; rather, “it always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable” (p. 169). In addition, many a trend proves to be partly reversible–at least over the short run–if the forces supporting it are repudiated or diverted into other channels. So, in a sketch of the history of composition in American education, Alvina Treut Burrows (1977), aptly refers to the “crosscurrents and strong headwinds” that obstruct progress, of regressions, of action followed by reaction. There is ample evidence from history to support this view. It is, therefore, tempting to view history as a series of cycles endlessly repeated. Another common metaphor likens history to a pendulum. This is misleading since a pendulum returns to the place from which it began its swing. This is not true of social events. For example, today’s quest for “back to Clifford A Sisyphean Task 3 basics” in education cannot, and does not intend to, return us to that single and even undeterminable place where we somehow went wrong. Too much else has changed in the interim, and the standards of the past would no longer be acceptable even to the critics of present arrangements. Today’s “basic literacy,” for example, incorporates expectations that far exceed those which satisfied our forebears (Resnick & Resnick, 1977). A United States Commissioner of Education at the turn of this century, William T. Harris, is rumored to have described the course of educational progress as “a zigzag, from one extreme to another.” But hindsight shows us that the reversals were not as extreme as they then appeared. Still, the fact that Harris spoke thus is instructive about the course of educational developments. If there is anything about which we can be reasonably certain it is that our successors will draw similar conclusions about their own times. The Plan of this Essay The thesis of this essay is that cycles of concern for an integrated, holistic approach to English language instruction have periodically emerged in reaction to historical forces that are essentially fragmenting in their effects. We will explore events in 20th-century American educational theory, research, and practice that illustrate and explain two fundamental and long-persisting facts about English language education in the schools. First, writing has been subordinated to reading and the other language skills taught in schools. Second, language skills have been separated from one another; in particular reading has been isolated from writing. The approach we take will be thematic, not chronological. There are better places to look for a systematic, sequential, time-oriented review of the major landmarks in the history of English language education, notably Arthur N. Applebee’s 1974 work, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English and H. Alan Robinson’s briefer 1977 collection, Reading and Writing Instruction in the United States. This is an essay using perspectives drawn from American educational and social history. It identifies five forces–the democratization of schooling, the professionalization of educators, technological change, the functionalist or pragmatic character of American culture, and liberationist ideologies–and probes their analytically separable but interacting influences on English language education. We will see that these influences promoted both separation and integration of the teaching of writing and reading. First, however, comes (a) a summary of the evidence for the assertions that writing has been dominated by reading in schools and that writing and reading have been separated for most of their histories; next, (b) illustrations of the prevailing opinion that integration in language education is the proper approach, giving rise to cycles of reform aimed at such integration; and then, (c) an overview of the emergence in the 19th century of English as an identifiable subject of the school and college curriculum. Writing and Reading in the Curriculum The Low Estate of Writing in the Schools The very first report that considered issues of secondary schooling in a national context–the 1894 report of the Committee of Ten–both declared that writing and reading are equal in importance and recommended that literature receive double the time that composition should have. No such landmark document exists for elemnttary education, but in a present-day work on interrelating writing and reading in the elementary school, the authors contend that “reading has dominated the scene in language arts instruction, research, and funding.” Furthermore, “in most elementary classrooms, reading instruction dominates the day, starts the instructional agenda, controls grouping, and dictates schedules” (Hansen, Newkirk, & Graves, 1985, p. 169). Years of studies of how classroom time is spent support this contention. In grades 1, 3, and 5 in the mid-1980s, only 15% of the school day was spent on writing; of that, two-thirds was spent on word-for-word copying in workbooks (Anderson, Heibert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1984). Investigations of secondary schools by the National Council of Teachers of English (hereafter NCTE) have repeatedly shown that more time was spent on literature than on all other aspects of the English curriculum combined; in the early 1980s, national reports indicated that Clifford A Sisyphean Task 4 less than 10% of a student’s time in English was spent writing connected prose (Hansen, et al., 1985). A study of 168 exemplary American high schools during the early 1960s–schools with high state or national reputations–reported that reading (i.e., literature) received roughly 3 1/2 times more attention than writing (i.e., composition) in English classrooms; moreover, English teachers were spending more time