Suggestions for a Commonsense Reform of the English Curriculum.

siderations should always start: with our contemporaries. Do we have a service to offer our contemporaries that is unique and essential for their well being? The answer is yes. We have had such a service to offer ever since the beginning of our profession. And in one fashion or another, we have been offering it. But consciously or subconsciously over the years, we have taken pains to hide the fact from both the public and from ourselves. For the service is nothing more and nothing less than training our contemporaries to read and write. By writing, I mean every type of written discourse from the simplest sentence wrestled over in writing laboratories to the most subtle kind of imaginative work produced in our creative-writing workshops. The term implies not only exposition but rhetoric, scientific and technical writing, business and professional writing, film and TV scenario writing, poetry and fiction writing, satire, and humor and burlesque, and whatever other modes are current and desired. By reading, I mean not attention to such concerns of the psychologist as eye-fixation and reading rate, but the reading of texts for pleasure and stimulation as well as understanding. Depending on the maturity of the students, the texts can vary from "Frankie and Johnny" to Finnegan's Wake. As I intimated above, we have been at pains to cover up the fact that we are basically teachers of reading and writing, probably because we find it more assuaging to the ego to call ourselves Romanticists or Johnsonians than teachers of reading and writing. Writing we have called "composition," "rhetoric," or "exposition" and have assigned instruction in it largely to graduate assistants and staff members low on the scale of prestige. Reading we have dolled up by calling it "critical reading" or obscured it altogether by calling it "practical criticism." Yet we are teachers of reading, pure and simple, whether we have students practice Middle English pronunciation or explore the theme of Hamlet or determine the organization of Tom Jones or look for the movement in an Emersonian essay or examine Mardi as Melville's batting practice for Moby-Dick or compare Tom Sawyer with the young Sam Clemens. No matter what our approach, we are basically concerned with the accurate reading of texts. True, you may be willing to say, but so what? There is a big "so what," because if we can conceive of our basic