In “The Etymologies,” Archbishop Isidore of Seville (d. 636 C.E.) said of rhetoric that it is “the science of speaking well; it is a flow of eloquence on civil questions whose purpose is to persuade men [sic] to do what is just and good . . . The orator is the good man [sic] skilled in speaking.”

A little over 5000 years ago, as far as we can tell, the first written language began in Sumer, a region of the Middle East between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, usually considered the cradle of civilization, in what is now modern-day Iraq. For the next 4800 years or so, almost nobody knew how to write. Even as languages evolved and spread across the planet, written literacy was slow to take off, and most people’s lives were lived barely affected by their lack of access to the written word. Literacy was for much of this time the purview of the powerful: the nobility, the merchant/business class, the church—the elites. This should be kept in mind, for much of what is written ahead stems from this fundamental reality: Language is power, authority, and agency. And it always has been.

I recently had an exchange with an old friend just after The Atlantic published the article, “The College Essay is Dead,” about the ChatGPT that automatically produces text when fed a prompt. I shared the article via text and wrote, “Well, there goes my job.” I have been a student of literacy of one sort or another for about 45 years. I have for the last 25 taught writing at the college level, and, for the last 14, have directed a writing program at a large, four-year public university. I was a reading hobbyist first, as discussed elsewhere on this blog, and a professional reader and writer and teacher later, all of this known to this friend. Yet, in response to the clear, disheartened malaise of my statement, she replied, “This has been around for awhile, and people having been selling papers. I did it, and now my son sells papers to his friends.” Set aside her apparent assumption that, despite 14 years directing a writing program, I might be unaware of all the ways student avoid writing their own essays, I was shocked by her nonchalant dismissal of the foundational concerns of my personal and professional life. Her subsequent statement that “not everyone can learn to write” further revealed that she could not be less concerned that the basic premise of my work is that, yes, in fact, everyone can and should learn to write. In close to twenty-five years of teaching college writing I have not found this to be false. Her appeal to capitalism as justification for selling papers was as predictable as a college student writing a paper advocating for the legalization of marijuana. Every writing teacher of any experience knows it’s coming and that it will be as uninspired as all the others they’ve received on the topic.

The history of composition studies can be said to be as old as written language. But that’s not strictly accurate. It could also be linked to rhetorical study, thus beginning about 2500 years ago with the Greeks—the Sophists and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (the Big Three), and many others. But that too would not be strictly accurate. Yes, they concerned themselves with the study of rhetoric, but they were primarily concerned with oration. Plato even describes his mentor’s distrust of writing in Phaedrus, in which Socrates suggests it will lead to people losing the ability to memorize. In telling how the Egyptian god, Thoth (or Theuth), brought the invention of writing to the king, Thamus, as an aid to memory, Socrates reveals the king’s response: “[Y]ou, who are the father of writing, attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources” (96). Perhaps the greatest irony of Phaedrus is that if Plato had not written it down we would not even have a record of the dialogue. Socrates, after all, left nothing written behind.

Among all the other things it is, writing (and language of all kinds) is a value system. I start always from this position. What this means is quite complex, of course. Writing is the act of stating what is real and true. Language itself creates reality and truth, sometimes creating multiple realities and truths that are at odds with one another. There are a few things we can attribute to language and writing. These form the basis for writing instruction in the 21st century, and oddly enough, my friend’s statements reinforce rather than refute the truth that:

• Language is power—it produces and reproduces power relationships in society
• Language is authority—it establishes one’s knowledge, as well as one’s right to speak
• Language creates/reifies reality—it is the principle means by which we shape our relationship to the universe around us and by which we reach agreement about what is true and real
• Language is a value system—it is the means by which we encode our cultural and societal values and it delineates what is of value and what isn’t
• Language produces identity—it is one of the primary ways we assert our selfhood and align ourselves with others possessing a shared identity
• Language and identity are linked—both work together and are in a constant state of evolution
  

Every language educator understands that language and what we consider reality—that is to say, our lived experience in this world—are inextricably linked. This is one of the most important concepts for language educators to understand and internalize. This is the point of what we do. And that point is: there is no Truth. At least not without language.

One of the principal concerns of Phaedrus is the manner by which we acquire an understanding of Truth (through philosophy). Truth with a capital T is different from truth with a small t. Big-T Truth exists, from point-of-view of Socrates and many other philosophers, externally. Which is to say, there is such a thing as Truth out there in the universe and the educated man (they always believed it would be a man) could acquire that Truth through the practice of philosophy. Thus, one would have to be highly-educated and in a unique position to pursue Truth. In Phaedrus, Socrates describes the soul (which is immortal) through an allegory in which the soul is a charioteer pulled through the heavens by two horses. He states that “one of these horses is fine and good and of noble stock, and the other the opposite in every way” (51). Thus, the soul is driving through the heavens, pulled by both good and bad forces, each pulling against the other for dominance. In this process, the soul travels the realm of truth: “The region of which I speak is the abode of the reality with which true knowledge is concerned, a reality without colour or shape, intangible but utterly real, apprehensible only by intellect which is the pilot of the soul” (52). In this allegory, then, the immortal soul travels through the heavens for eternity, acquiring greater knowledge and becoming perfected. Not surprisingly, philosophers such as Socrates were meant to be closer to perfection—more knowledgeable, more able to ascertain Truth.

The search for knowledge and some ultimate Truth has been with us for millennia, generally categorized as epistemological (knowing) and ontological (being). Throughout the 20th century, several linguistic theorists began to focus on how reality is created and mediated through language, and these theorists’ ideas formed the foundation of current composition theory and pedagogy. Most importantly, language theorists of the late 20th century argued that writing is a social and rhetorical activity. It is a way we go about creating what’s real. Language in general is the method for creating Truth. And that Truth has changed over time and will change again. Writers understand this as the power of rhetoric. Students who are being taught to write and think rhetorically should also understand this.

The rise of rhetoric as a field of study coincides with the rise of the Athenian democracy. And for the last two hundred and fifty years, the American project, however you want to define it, owes a great deal to language (oral and written) and to the power of rhetoric to shape it. Although modern-day capitalists think of education as primarily designed to meet their needs and to increase their profit-margins, since at least the Progressive era public education was meant to serve all Americans and to encourage an active and critical participation in all aspects of the American democracy. For at least a century, then, we have been bound by the understanding that living in a democracy must be taught, that educators should embrace that role, and that we can certainly do that in many different disciplines in deliberate and thoughtful ways.

What we think of as the beginning of democracy is the system of governing that arose in the city-state of Athens around 400 BCE. This was by no means a true democracy in the sense that not everyone had the right to participate. In particular, women and slaves were not permitted in the legislative body of Athens. Citizens of other city-states who migrated to or lived in Athens were also not initially permitted to participate. One of the key concepts of democracy must surely be universal suffrage. However, even this is not an historical aspect of the American democracy, nor is it still today. Women were not granted the vote until 1920, and voter disenfranchisement is still rampant through means both legal and illegal in the U.S.

Be that as it may, and of course I could talk endlessly about voter disenfranchisement (see recent efforts to curtail or outright eliminate voting), I’m concerned here with returning to the role of rhetoric in a democracy. A quick note on the Athenian Democracy: The word democracy comes from the the Greek dêmos (δῆμος, which means “people”) and krátos (κράτος, which means “force” or “power”), so that we get something that roughly means “power residing in the people.” Democracy developed in Athens over many years, roughly between 600 and 400 BCE. The main legislative body was the assembly (the Ecclesia), which consisted of about 6000 members from those Athenians eligible to participate. A great deal of governing depended upon the power of oratory. In the assembly and in the courts of law, one made one’s case through the powerful use of speech. Do you see where this is going yet? Speech—powerful, logical, compelling, credible, and persuasive—was the means by which an individual might have a lawsuit found in his favor, or by which a law might be passed by a majority of the assembly. But such oratory does not come easily or naturally. Then, as now, one must learn rhetoric in order to speak (and write) most effectively. If you were trying to get compensation from a charioteer who has run over and killed your goat, wouldn’t you prefer to have strong skills in oratory?

Formal speech at this time was divided into three categories: deliberative, judicial, and epideictic. The first two refer to speech done in the assembly and in the courts. The third is honorific speech— for instance a eulogy: “William Breeze was a man of many… ties. Guy had so many ties. What he is most remembered for was… all those damned ties.” So these are the three principle forms of oratory that were taught. And who did this teaching? Greek rhetoricians, among them the group referred to as the Sophists (from which we get the term “sophistry”). The Sophists (of whom, Gorgias and Protagoras were the most famous) taught a number of subjects, but are perhaps best known as teachers of rhetoric, and to a lesser degree, philosophy. One of the major foci of their instruction was the effective use of rhetoric, and Protagoras was known for teaching students to argue both sides of an issue in order to get closer to the truth, a position denounced by Socrates and Plato as a means of actually obscuring the truth. Today we would call this approach “playing the devil’s advocate.”

However their work is portrayed, whether negatively or positively, I think it’s fair to say that the Sophists were one of the earliest known groups, however loosely connected, of public educators, and in them we find our professional ancestors. The role the Sophists played in the burgeoning Athenian democracy should reveal to us a profound belief that we can (and I would argue, must) adhere to even now: democracy, and the ongoing perfection of it, is only possible through the education of its people, thus making teachers the most important people responsible for the health and well-being of a democratic nation.

If we believe that the teachers play a crucial role in a democracy—by teaching students content and by teaching students social skills, critical thinking, morality, and ethics—then it is fair to say that what we do as teachers—everything we do—has a political dimension. Morality and ethics. To state that educators teach these two things might be, for some, rather contentious. A significant number of parents will likely counter by stating that it is their responsibility and theirs alone to teach their children morality and ethics. And depending on the nature of their belief about this, some parents are even hostile at any perceived overstepping into this area by teachers. Being an educator means to be forever in a state of navigating social, cultural, and political issues, as well as the perceptions/opinions people have of what your responsibility as educator is. I think one of the fallacies at the heart of this issue is the same fallacy at the heart of most educational issues: that knowledge is merely a set of discernible facts that can be delivered unproblematically from a disinterested teacher to a student without regard for social, cultural, economic, or political influence on the educational experience. Furthermore, the notion is that if students accumulate and store these facts, the job of the teacher is successful and, at this point, over. I would argue that standardized testing and a great deal of current education practice is built entirely on this false notion.

Take any subject—math for instance. Standardized testing tells us that a teacher can take a group of 30 kids, teach a set curriculum, one often geared to the test, and implant the necessary information in the heads of those kids, which can then be demonstrated on the test. What this amounts to is a simplistic (and false) formula: a teacher has content knowledge and gives it to the student (the initial transaction) —> the student stores that knowledge in his or her head —> the student replicates that knowledge on the test = the standardized test reliably measures the effectiveness of the initial transaction. After this formula is fulfilled, the teacher and student move on to something else and the bureaucracy takes over with reports and budgets and recommendations and calls for ending funding and much hand-wringing about the sorry state of the educational system. Then, a murmur is heard within the quiet halls of state legislatures and in corporate board rooms, faint at first, but then louder: Perhaps we should privatize the educational system. Perhaps a private company could do better. Keep something in mind, however: much like the private prison industry, widely discussed by Angela Davis and others, these schools are still funded by tax dollars, which means the public is merely subsidizing schools run by companies. This is called the privatization of public assets. And to be sure, that is very much a matter of politics and economics. Such privatization relies on the premise that corporations not only have our best interests at heart (although we are routinely shown otherwise) but are also best equipped to tell us what we need. This is fundamentally un-democratic and, in fact, requires the systematic unraveling of the very democracy we claim to be. Vox populi replaced by vox tyrannus.

As much as many would have us believe it is, the business of knowledge is not apolitical. And those who know the business best—teachers—seldom have an adequate voice in decisions made about schools and educational policy. In 1995, in the collection Higher Education Under Fire (Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson), Linda Ray Pratt states:

In the intervening twenty-seven years, little has changed on that front. To see where we are, you need know nothing more than that our last Secretary of Education was a billionaire Trump donor with almost no actual experience in education, but with a firm belief that public education should be dismantled. In every way imaginable, the classroom becomes a contested space—the books we use (and ban), the assignments we create, the tests we administer, the bullets (literal and figurative) we dodge, the funding we hope for at the mercy of voters, and even our fundamental understanding of what it means to create and share knowledge in service to perfecting the American democracy.

Lingering at the heart of this essay is the question, “Why do we teach?” More specifically, why do we teach writing? Beyond all the utilitarian reasons (e.g., so workers can write reports), writing is the best way to develop the critical thinking and rhetorical understanding needed to function in society at the most deliberate and conscious level. My friend’s assertion that selling essays to students is “just capitalism” could not illuminate the problem more clearly. Asking students to write essays is not only about teaching base-level writings skills—it is about asking them to engage honestly and ethically with the intellectual work of the society in which they live. “Just capitalism” is a declaration of ethical relativism and of buying and selling as the supreme moral principle. How much could we overlook as “just capitalism” if we extend that view to places where we ourselves are not willing to make a buck—but where plenty of others are?

But what if, instead of writing everything you’ve just read, I just left it up to the AI? I might ask it to “write an essay about why it’s important to write.” And it would produce a serviceable response, but one that achieved nothing for me or for my reader:

The AI is largely correct here, if terribly flaccid. Of course acquiring this did nothing for my knowledge or my critical thinking. It revealed nothing of how rhetoric shapes reality. Nor did it help democracy in any way. Ironically, this AI-produced essay kept me from achieving any of what it suggests writing achieves. Worse yet, it’s fucking boring. But maybe it made me a better capitalist?