So here’s a valiant offensive in the war to preserve the craft of teaching against the technocratic assessment regime.
The core of Warner’s argument seems to be this: “I believe that in many cases, these young professionals have never encountered a genuine and meaningful rhetorical situation in an academic or professional context. They are highly skilled at a particular kind of academic writing performance that they have been doing from a very early age, but they are largely unpracticed at that what their employers expect them to do, clearly communicate ideas to specific audiences.
My students’ chief struggle tends to be rooted in years of schooling where what they have to say doesn’t really matter, and the primary focus is on “how” you say things.
This need is driven by an overblown assessment culture, fueled by well-intentioned instructors who want to arm students with techniques that will allow them to write in ways that will score well on assessments, particularly standardized assessments, including AP exams.”
Now rhetoric, of course, is one of the three liberal arts of the Trivium. It is an art that relies on certain virtues. Rhetoric requires foresight, circumspection, and a fine-grained apprehension of the character and needs of the audience, among other things, and a well-practiced ability to match means with ends (the virtue of prudence). Rhetoric is too much lodged in the concrete circumstances of the moment to be reducible to techniques, even though techniques are important. Training students in rhetoric through rubrics, which are set and mechanical measures abstracted from circumstances, not only does not help the student to develop the art of rhetoric but actually harms the student’s ability to write or speak in the moment, responsive to the particularities of audience and occasion.
The liberal arts are habits, not techniques. The habit of rhetoric, in fact, is what guides the deployment of rhetorical techniques. Without the habit of rhetoric, it is impossible to figure out which techniques to use and when. I think that is what Warner is getting at when he says, “Writing is balancing, making choices while considering audience, purpose, occasion. The rhetorical situation has been at the core of writing instruction forever, and yet much of the writing we ask developing writers to do keeps them from fully wrestling with those choices because we strap on the training wheels and never take them off.” There are, of course, many schools that claim to educate in or using the liberal arts. The sad fact is that most schools claiming to be liberal arts schools have a majority of faculty members who couldn’t even name the seven liberal arts as classically understood, let alone give an account for why they are either “liberal” or “arts.”
A good way to tell whether a school truly does teach the liberal arts is to find out how important rubrics and technocratic assessments are to the education it offers. But a warning! This is not just a surface-level investigation you should make. Regional accreditation agencies oftentimes require that there not only be an assessment regime in place at each school but that there be some kind of objective measure used in that assessment—and rubrics are usually the easiest tool to use. It may be that schools, and individual professors in those schools, use rubrics in teaching writing in order to comply with accreditation requirements, but those rubrics play only a very small role in the actual education.
I did find myself disappointed with Warner’s conclusion. His insight into the situation of his students is keen, but his proposal is so vague! He concludes, “For me, the key to changing this is to make writing more enga
ging in every sense of the word, to require students to make meaning about subjects that are meaningful to them, to create stakes that go beyond assessments that mostly measure how good students are at passing an assessment.” But what does “engaging” mean? What does it mean to be meaningful? What sorts of stakes? In order for writing education to get better, there will need to be a keener insight not only into the problems with the way writing is taught currently, but into the nature of rhetoric itself and, with it, a liberal education.
Kinda looks like the crude Draconian/"Snape"-ian application of Warner's essay would be to ban all rubrics. And all B-grades also.