Forward to the Basics

Abstract

GET THEE BACK to the basics, we heard at the 1976 Conference on College Composition and Communication. Despite sonle irreverent twitting in the Conference (What's Really Basic About Philadelphia?), there wvas and is quite a vociferous group who would have us believe that English teachers ought to be getting down to the business of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and so forth and therefore not wasting so much time on whatever it is we've been doing instead. It is no news to most of the profession that college freshmen don't write as well as we would like, but it is news that students are now thought to write wvorse than they used to. We are told that some schools are turning out illiterate graduates. It is difficult to believe this applies to very many schools or very many students, but there seems to be little doubt that the current dissatisfaction with composition derives at least in part from the national phenomena of rising grade point averages and falling standardized test scores. Today the average grade in most subjects is B, and this is hard to reconcile with plummeting ACT and SAT scores.1 Currently the National Assessment of Educational Progress is collecting data which suggest a general decline in nearly everything for which the English teacher is responsible.2 Malcolm B. Scully writes of the Crisis in English Writing.3 Prestigious universities institute remedial and basic courses in composition and sometimes impose a competency test to make sure that students have acquired the skills their grades imply. College English issues a call to the profession to submit manuscripts on the question of basics. We have even seen the truly novel development of students suing public schools for failing to educate. Anyone who has been teaching for very long must feel a gauzy sense of deja vu in the new crisis. It may be an act of self defense to ask why it is that we have these cyclical ups and downs or ins and outs in freshman English (basics are in . . . again). What is it about composition that so resists stability and which sooner or later drives a good number of teachers to despair? One comforting answer has always been that it is the students who are unstable; the puzzle within