The Sexes
In Elizabethada A. Wright and S. Michael Halloran’s essay, the two discuss teaching methods in American to 1900 and specifically refer to the styles of John Brinsley and Catharine Beecher. Both Brinsley and Beecher share ideas that students learn through basic mechanics and writing by practice, they stress the need for student’s vocabulary, skills, and understanding the text, and both address the need to study important authors to obtain those skills. But their differences in pedagogies is much more interesting than their similarities. Brinsley teaching method to obtaining “purity” was though the practice of “emulating classical models and internalizing the grammatical and rhetorical forms of the classical languages,” while Beecher’s method to attaining “purity” is through examination and analysis of writers in English (216). I also find the fact that Brinsley was concerned with teaching boys and Beecher with girls is fascinating, because pedagogies tend to vary when they become sex specific, just as the essay points out that Brinsley preferred texts to be read aloud and Beecher chose aloud and in silent.
Writing in the Middle Class
I found this section of the essay most fascinating because it explained how people of the middle class who were not in school were able to teach themselves to read and write, especially women and nonwhites. The system of giving children the opportunity to learn because books were available to them is the whole reason that the middle class had a chance in education. Of course at some point the upper class would try to take their education back and the concept of “correct” English came into play, but with Adams Sherman Hill developed “correctness” that appealed to the middle classes that gave “students the social mobility they sought” (231). The essay points out James Berlin’s view of the relationship between the middle class and the rhetoric of correctness:
English studies is a highly overdetermined institutional formation, occupying a site at the center of converging economic, social, political, and cultural developments at the end of the nineteenth century, developments that continue to affect today (231)
In Stewart’s essay, he discusses the emphasis on English departments and how they favor the study of English and American literature, composition is for graduate courses, and speech and linguistics are in other departments altogether. He also says that departments will offer “studies of film, women’s studies and technical writing…but these studies are superficial and often transitory departures from what English departments perceive their main business to be” (121). I disagree with Stewart’s comment and fully believe English studies embody all of these elements no matter what level they are being taught at. Yes, at one point English department’s favored literature, but it is now moving in a completely different direction, while still maintaining its literature upbringing.
