The Reform Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Composition Teaching

The composition teaching we tend to associate with nineteenth-century schools was exemplified by A. S. Hill's courses at Harvard, which emphasized correctness, clarity, stylistic refinements, and organization. But there was also a “reform tradition” that stressed the importance of the student's interests and experience, and saw the writing task as based on observation, description, speaking, and listening. Inspired partly by romantic educational theories from the continent, this tradition grew out of the social and educational reforms of the 1830s and 1840s and provided the basis for the early progressive teaching of the 1890s.