19th Century Theory...(Schultz's "Elaborating Our History"

This was the hardest of the writings for me to get through so far.  Honestly?  I had to change chairs to stay awake because the one I started out sitting in was too comfortable. 

I struggled to see the relevance of the discussion to what we are trying to arrive at which is a serious discussion of what we hope to accomplish as teachers/scholars of writing and what thinking underlies and give shape to that process.  I realize we have to know where we came from to know where we're going, but wow...This isn't even a discussion of where we really came from, but rather a discussion of marginal voices, largely drowned out that color where we came from with a greater complexity than is at first apparent.  

So for me, the article was a reminder of the necessity of avoiding the assumption that we know exactly how it was, or exactly what caused something to happen, because even if generally true, the whole truth is always more complex than that.

It was interesting to see how Dr. Schultz's work reflected the emphasis on marginal voices that has grown in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in all English/Literary/ Composition disciplines.  Her argument at the end of the piece for broadening our discourse to include more voices - especially those in a different key and tempo, and perhaps playing a different melody altogether from the dominant theme - has been the general trend and focus of literary studies again and again.  Where we can't find alternative voices, we can at least look at the text through the varied theoretical lenses that attempt to find these other voices or how they are silenced/treated in other texts.  

The dominant theme as reflected in reverse through the counterpoint emphasised in the texts covered here is disturbing.  I hate to think how a writing class would go with today's students if we required them to memorize what we were reading to them and then rewrite it, forbid writing from personal experience, and didn't allow them to write on their own even on abstract topics until well into the course.  

It seems so counter intuitive.  You're going to teach them to write, but they don't pick up a pencil until the second text, or the fortieth or fiftieth chapter of the first text...As Schultz points out what is taught in such a situation is much more scribal duties than writing.  Writing is thinking, and even if the  result is more organized than random thought, and even than most speeches if the speech is any good, the beginning at least should be as free to roam as we can make it.

Perhaps I am showing a certain provincialism and certainly I am judging a very different world by my standards, but how did anyone learn to write in the way most of these texts described?