Kampf, Louis. “Must We Have a Cultural Revolution?“ CCC 21 (1970): 245-249.
This article was cited by Sirc when I read Composition as a Happening, and I only knew that it was from the 1970s and that Kampf called Composition “oppressive“ and called for its end. So I had to check it out…
Kampf writes that Freshman Composition is a tool of the system to weed out students and continue a social hierarchy, where middle class white values are taught and enforced, and those that don’t meet them are weeded out. He envisions a different writing and communication classroom: “Writing might be one way for students to begin the arduous task of discovering something about themselves and the world around them; indeed, it might provide the only opening toward any kind of humane education“ (245).
The need to communicate is “profoundly human,“ according to Kampf, but education as it is now, is not. It is a series of teaching skills, of teaching students to be workers. Kampf himself feels that he got through high school, undergraduate school, and grad school because he was middle class and “had a talent for writing meaningless compositions on order“ (246). Schools, to Kampf, serve the needs of institutions that oppress them, not the needs of students, and reinforce social order (248).
Kampf writes that “Freshman English courses should become part of a resistance culture giving students a sense of a different world: of social arrangements which do not transform our skills—our very language—into a source of labor value“ (249). In the end, he calls not just for revolution for the composition classroom, but for a political socialist (!) revolution.
I really like this article, though brief. I think that the composition classroom 35 years later is a little more “enlightened“ and less about teaching skills, but I think it’s still a problem, especially since why do students need to write academic essays? It is not for them, but for the system (to be a good employee, to be a good student, to reinforce the need for an educational system, etc.)
I have to disagree with Kampf that “Composition courses should be eliminated, not improved“ (248). But I think this comes from some form of hope that a Composition classroom can be a place for cultural change. Perhaps not a political revolution on the stage of local and national governments, but perhaps a place for change within students? Is it possible to focus on the needs of students rather than on the needs of an institution? Can a classroom be a place of resistance when I am part of the institution?
