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country’s place in it all. And it came down to America’s
schools, much more specifically, to rhetoric – to the writing
classes for America’s youth, whether those in secondary school
or the newly college-institutionalized courses in freshman
composition – to serve as a standardizing “filter” in the
service of the dogma and dicta, conscious or not, of those
extracurricular forces striving to control the “fate” of the
country: again, religion, science, medicine, politics,
economics and industry. For James Berlin in Writing Instruction
in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges, rhetoric, as it was
popularly translated in writing classes throughout America in
the 19 th
century, acted as a “gatekeeper.” Discussing the
ascendancy of usage, grammar, and “correctness” in the writing
classrooms of the 1800s, Berlin writes:
The mark of the educated was now the use of a certain
version of the native language, a version that tended
to coincide with the dialect of the upper middle
class, the group that had customarily attended
college. Children of the lower orders were now asked
to prove their worthiness for a place in the upper
ranks of society – now defined by profession as well
as income – by learning this dialect. Composition
teachers became the caretakers of the English tongue,
and more important, the gatekeepers on the road to
good things in life, as defined by the professional
class. (72)
And on the rhetorical system in which such “correct” grammar was
integral, Berlin continues:
The best that can be said of this model is that
students were indeed writing. The worst that can be
said is that this model severely restricts the
student’s response to experience. Currenttraditional
rhetoric dictates that certain matters
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