[ "As you will hear, this is a paper about the implications of experience-based
writing in mid-19th century schools--but I begin with an extended example and then move
to a discussion of that example and its wider significance."]

In 1841, Sarah Griffin, a teacher in Georgia, published Familiar Tales for

Children, a collection of 28 fictional tales intended both to instruct and delight her
readers. Like much 19th century popular writing for children, most of the tales use
everyday life in ideal family settings to demonstrate desirable behaviors to young readers;
in the stories, for example, children obey their parents rather than pursue a forbidden
pleasure; they show kindness to their playmates, especially those who are poor, and they
recognize the folly--and the consequences--of skipping school. In all these tales, the
message is very clear that it is the child' s duty to be obedient and respectful and accepting
of authority.

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Two, ales

/\

f~cus exclusively on school behaviors; in one, the heroine allows her

friend to win the school prize; again the message is put aside your own desire--sacrifice
yourself--for the good of another. In a second school tale, however, called "The School
Composition," a somewhat different dynamic is at work. Griffin' s fictional personae, a
girl Ellen and her mother, Mrs. H ., discuss a theme Ellen wrote for school entitled
"Industry." Here is part of that theme:
Industry is a very great virtue: it is one of the greatest virtues, for it leads
to all others. How important is it to cultivate it then, to its greatest possible
extent. What would the world come to, if there were no industrious people in it?
All would soon fall into ruin, and desolation would soon cover the whole earth . ..

. It is essential that we should commence the practice of industry early in life, for

when our habits are formed, it will be in vain to conquer the indolence which has
'grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength. ' (Griffin 128)
The turn of events here is that Ellen's teacher heaps rich praise on the theme; Ellen,
however, •

declares, in her words, that the theme is "stupid" --that the themes of

almost all of her fellow students "were almost exactly the same" and they "did not mean
much." Ellen' s mother agrees and suggests that since the students have been invited to
choose their own topics for their next essays, Ellen should write a different kind of essay,
and in it "describe some pleasant evening' s amusement, or a ramble."
And thus Ellen sets out to describe a Saturday afternoon outing that she enjoyed
with her family and friends. A servant drives her and her brother to see their cousins in the
country; there the children wander into the pasture where the sheep are grazing in the sun.
Worried that the sun must hurt the sheep's eyes, they decide to make bonnets for the
sheep out of collard greens. Here is a piece of that text:
then we went into the pasture where the sheep were: we sat down under a tree:
pretty soon Frank said, 'Only see, cousin, how the sheep almost shut their eyes;
don't you suppose that the sun hurts them?' 'I don't know, I am sure;' said I, 'I
never noticed it before.' So he got up and ran off: pretty soon he came back with
some large collard leaves and some string: 'What are you going to do with those
collard leaves?' said I, ' O, I am going to make bonnets for the poor sheep; ' said
he, 'for I know the sun hurts them.' So he and William caught several, and tied the
leaves on for bonnets: the creatures did not know what to make of it; they tried to
eat them, but their mouths would not turn over; so they ran about sometime with

2

them on, till at last they ate them from each other's heads. William tried to catch
the old ram, to put a bonnet on him; but he soon made him quit that, for he butted
at him and laid him flat. Willie laughed, and said 'the ram might bum his eyes out
before he made him another bonnet.' · (Griffin 132-33)
At the end of Sarah Griffin's tale, Ellen takes her experience-based composition to school
and notes that "there was never anything like it in the school before." Weary of "Duty,"
"Industry," "Truth" as topics, she is determined "to set a new fashion [in writing] for the
girls" (133-34).
Like the other tales in Griffin's collection, this one shows a young person seeking
approval from a parent; unlike the others, however, it shows a child resisting the authority
of the teacher--and the site for this resistance is the struggle about the merits of writing
about "Industry" versus the merits of writing about making collard green bonnets for
~ \ ~ ~,

sheep, or, the struggle about the merits of writing about abstract topics vs the merits of
writing about lived experience.
So--a number of implications. Unlike the universities, which until after the Civil
War were educating primarily upper-class students for careers in the law and ministry and
responding to the rhetorics of Campbell and Blair with their emphasis on public exchange,
the static, the abstract, and the distant, mid-19th century schools were preparing students
for the world of work, and especially for the trades and professions. And in their
pedagogy, the schools were respondie

to the work of Swiss education reformer

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi with its emphasis on direct experience as a learning too@

~

a new understanding of the cognitive development of the child. Writing pedagogy in the
schools, therefore, as early as the mid-19th century, began to show signs of resistance to

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abstra~

~~~
static topics and signs of the inclusion of the personal and experience-based

topicf'This resistance is evident not only in the textbooks and in educational writings, but
also in the popular literature. Here in the case of the Griffin text, a layered resistance
emerges: the fictionalized persona Ellen resists abstract topics, resists the teacher's
authority in having assigned those topics, disagrees with the teacher's praise for the paper,
and hopes to start a new fashion in writing. Because Griffin wrote her tales for both the
delight and instruction of children, there is no reason to think this particular tale is not also
meant to instruct--that is, to encourage children to speak up both about their writing--and
in it.
When school-based writing included experience--even the experience of making
collard green bonnets for sheep--a number of freedoms opened to the writer. Students
were invited to describe the simple objects, places, and scenes of their lives; to write about
farming and fishing and manufacturing and shopkeeping; to recount their own experiences
of friends, family, school, holidays, and reading and writing. And they were invited to
give their point of view in this writing, that is, they were asked to give their thoughts on a
subject. I don't claim that early 19th century textbook writers or Sarah Griffin "taught"
point of view by asking students to write experience-based essays. I do think, however,
that asking students to write from their own observation and their own experience opened
a space for them to take a position, to begin to write, as Linda Brodkey, says, "on the
bias"; when William is butted by the ram, he is very clear that he' s not about to befriend
any more sheep. In other words, writing that is inflected by lived experience can allow
students to take a small step toward critical thinking by helping them to understand that

4

one way to internalize knowledge or to understand a concept is to filter it through the
writer's experience.
When 19th century students followed the college-model, writing memorized themes
or themes about abstract topics, they were, of course, reflecting the received wisdom of
their culture, whether or not they were aware of it. For example, in the mid-19th century,
a common belief was that novel reading, especially for adolescents, was dangerous. In a
piece called "Hints to Young Ladies," a writer in an 1856 edition of the American Journal

of Education said "you have no excuse for reading the profligate and romantic novels of
the last century, or the no less profligate and far more insidious romances of the present
day" (229). And it is not uncommon to read 19th century student essays--especially essays
by older students--that elaborate the dangers of novels. In her 1846 prize-winning essay
called "On Novel Reading," Mary King, a student at the Academy of the Visitation, wrote
that by reading novels, the mind is "poisoned" and "deceived," and the heart becomes
"restless" and "dissatisfied." In King's essay, an essay that I believe is an important
cultural document, she follows a common writing pattern in formal texts written by 19th
century students: she relies on universals to support her position, and her knowledge, at
least as she displays it for the reader, is grounded in external authority rather than personal
experience. While King of course may have had experience with novels and with novel
reading, there is no visible trace of that in the essay. Instead, the essay demonstrates that
she had, and very successfully, learned the acsrpted position on novel-reading for 19th

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century young ladie7'. "Amongst the numerous o\5'.iects presented by the world to check
the improvement of the mind, and prevent the development of those good qualities,
natural to the human heart; there is none which produces this effect with more certainty

5

than the habit ofreading novels." Nothing in King's essay suggests that she understands
that the values she represents are not universal or transcendent, but are, instead,
circumscribed and limited by a set of contingencies.
I am not prepared to argue that when experience-based writing was introduced in
19th century schools, students were interrogating the social construction of their
experiences in the way that some contemporary writers propose; that is, I don't believe the
students were using their experience as the basis for cultural analysis. I do, argue, though,
that when experience-based writing entered the writing curriculum in the 19th century, its
role was, at least in some ways to challenge the status quo of writing assignments: no
longer was the published writing of accomplished authors the only acceptable model for
student writers; no longer were students required to sound like adults in their writing.
When experience-based writing entered the curriculum, children learned that what they did
outside of school was important in school, and they further learned that their experience
could be the basis for knowledge-production. Finally, and most significantly, I believe
that when students represented their experiences in school-based writing, they were taking
the first and necessary step toward the critical use of experience that writers like John
Schilb and others advocate. Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren write, for example, that
"Only when we can name our experiences--give voice to our own world and affirm
ourselves as active social agents with a will and purpose--can we begin to transform the
meaning of those experiences by critically examining the assumptions upon which those
experiences are built" (16). The value, thus, of students in the schools writing about their
experiences is not simply that they were writing in ways that were in line with their
intellectual development; it is that as a discipline, we were taking our first steps toward an

6

understanding that giving voice to experience can help us to interrogate the culture and
the assumptions from which that experience springs.
My emphasis on this innovation is not to discredit or deny the value of writing that
is not overtly grounded in personal experience; it is rather to say that teaching students
(how) to interrogate experience and to use it as a form of evidence and/or as a place from
which to start gathering and/or testing other evidence, practices we so take for granted,
were a long time coming to writing instruction, and that when they were introduced, they
greatly expanded the concept of what writing was, and what it could do. In the 19th
century, experience-based writing made possible a move away from the emphasis on taste
that had characterized so much of writing instruction in the 18th and early 19th centuries
and the corresponding emphasis on class, and it made space for students whose lives were
situated in the world of manual labor and the world of work. Today, this piece of our
history--the move toward the democratization of writing instruction--also challenges our
profession's long-standing and deeply embedded notion that pedagogical innovation
always trickles down rather than percolates up .

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