In the following pages I will describe certain trends in the rhetoric and composition profession toward the teaching of writing as pure technique and argue that they are much more deeply rooted in the changing economic structure of our society, and have much more serious implications, than we usually realize. I find, in my work as chairman of a freshman composition program, that the growing importance of freshman composition within the university puzzles many observers. They ask why there is this sudden need for remediation on such a massive scale and often, without pausing for an answer, attribute it to a failure of the public schools, to lower standards in the schools fostered by the anarchic generation just now reaching the ranks of academic middle management. Although attractive, arguments of this kind cannot be completely supported. The purpose of freshman composition classes is not just remediation. Nor is the growth of college composition purely the result of a mysterious catastrophe devastating the nation's public school system. That system continues, by and large, to serve the purposes for which it was developed. Most public high schools, after all, are not supposed to be humanistic gymnasia. They never were. Of course a few high schools, usually private, were meant to provide a humanistic education for a small number of young people, preparing them for leading universities and for leading careers. These schools continue to function much as they always have, and their patron universities are not ill-served. It is pointless exaggeration, for instance, to claim that most freshman at Harvard or at Berkeley are illiterate. The problems these young people have with writing are those common among traditionally literate people. They tend to use an artificial, highly formal idiom that inhibits the expression of their ideas. The antidotes for this are well known and routine: Strunk and White, impromptu essays, all that ensemble so loved by editors and educators. On the other hand, most high schools in this country were, are, meant to teach their students enough to make it possible for them to find a place not in the universities, but in the labor force. In these schools teaching means the inculcation of habits of discipline as much as the impartation of knowledge. (This is symbolized by that interesting institution, study hall, which, as many of us remember, was a place of punishment as much as, if not more than, a sanctuary of juvenile scholarship.) This was the traditional division. Students from Manual Arts High School