Commentary: English composition as we know it began in the early nineteenth century...but why is that important? Why would we care about poorly educated grammar school pedagogues—our distant colleagues!—fingers aching with cold as they parsed sentences, heard recitations, and fed the wood stove during those long wintery terms? Very simply, because their lives, practices, and less frequently, their writings give us back ourselves. Our own problems in teaching writing have recurrently presented themselves in forms that nineteenth-century teachers easily would have recognized. Like them, we sense the ongoing need for hard basics, the primitive core of our profession. Yet like those early teachers, we also dwell within a “reform tradition” that stresses the importance of students' interests and experience and continues to see the writing task as based on what used to be called “synthetic” insights and “self-active” learning. 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. Prominent during the 1930s, and reasserting itself powerfully in the 1960s and 1990s, this student-centered approach manifests the continuing vitality of the enlightenment ideas and values and the romantic individualism that first gave it life.

The teaching of English grammar in the nineteenth century can be a rewarding subject of study because it reveals attitudes toward language and language teaching that also shaped the pedagogy of rhetoric, composition, and literature during that period. The prescriptive attitude toward grammar and usage inherited from the eighteenth century was a powerful determinant both in grammar teaching and in the teaching of speaking, reading, and writing, where taste, facility, precision, and perspicuity (clarity) were central issues. And when continental notions of inductive (we would say progressive) teaching begin to have an effect on American education, the signs of change appear earliest in the school grammar texts. In this essay I will describe the main strands of theory and practice in early nineteenth-century grammar teaching and then show how these analytic and synthetic approaches were combined in grammar texts around the middle of the century, contributing to an eclectic theory of expression employed in both grammar and composition teaching by the 1890s.

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.