In this, the first full-length history of school-based writing instruction, Schultz demonstrates that writing instruction in nineteenth-century American schools is much more important than we have previously assumed.

Drawing on primary materials—little-known textbooks and student writing—Schultz shows that during the nineteeenth-century writing instruction became child-centered, not just a replica or imitation of writing instruction in the colleges.

It was also in these nineteenth-century American schools that personal or experience-based writing began and where the democratization of writing was institutionalized. These schools prefigured some of our contemporary composition practices: free writing, peer editing, and the use of illustrations as writing prompts. It was in these schools, in fact, where composition instruction as we know it today began, Schultz argues.
Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) series. 219 pp. 1999. College. NCTE/CCCC and Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-8093-2236-6.
No. 59257