Incredible as it may sound, the problem with writing is that few of those charged with teaching it can agree on what it is. The younger the teacher, the greater the chance that he will not only lack clear ideas on the nature of writing, but may also have the notion that in a computerized universe of information the communicator has less need of expertise in written communication. Interns have not only repeatedly confirmed to me that they have had no instruction in how to teach writing, but they have repeatedly voiced the opinion, apparently picked up somewhere in colleges of education, that skill in written communication is no longer of central importance in the new world of electronic technology. Despite the lip service often paid to the importance of communication in an electronic world, the fact of information technology may nonetheless be contributing substantially to a lack of urgency in the teaching of written communication. Those enamoured of computer technology, especially in the early heady days, sometimes gave the impression that machines would soon be able to organize the steps in composition so readily that carelessness, not only in mechanics (style, spelling) but in thinking itself, could be easily corrected, allowing almost any writing background to suffice. As a result, there seems still to be a tendency to dismiss concern with expository communication per se as "print mentality", now outmoded, along with books and libraries as we know them.

Be that as it may, there is no denying the reality of the lack of consensus on the nature and importance of teaching writing, which is so widespread that the term "English Department" in a high school is usually a misnomer. If a high school English department has seven teachers, there may be seven different approaches to writing. Good, and sometimes superb, teachers of writing do exist, but English teachers in general are more at home teaching literature, a bias which follows naturally from the prevalent neglect of formal instruction in how to teach composition, but which may also reflect a common concern for possible behaviour complications which may ensue if formal writing is not accepted as a "fun" activity by students. Many teachers do seem to entertain the naive hope that literature will be more successful than composition in promoting desirable student attitudes. Literature allows more room for the intuitive, for personal interpretation. There is room for both the inspired and the superficial. Writing, as crystallized thinking, is more structured, and demands greater discipline. The mentally lazy may be able to fake it through a literature course, but writing, in the sense that I have defined it, is much less forgiving. Students commonly seem to have less fun doing formal writing, which may explain a common teacher tendency to downplay such writing assignments.

Teachers are not alone in this, however. It is puzzling that public concern with literacy so often limits itself to reading and interest in literature, allowing everyone to be side-tracked into the old game of seeking out magic wands to seduce young readers into books. Give the reader the capacity to organize and transmit data, and the instruction in reading will follow naturally.

Reading is a first priority only in the early grades, and it is tempting to speculate why public interest in education gets mired there. Are we caught by a behaviorist notion that conditioning the very young is all we have to add to solve the problem of literacy?

It is a tribute to the many capable teachers in public schools that two thirds of university entrants still measure up in literacy, more or less. If nothing else, this suggests that the goal of general functional literacy need not be thought of as hopelessly out of reach. However, the existing degree of success has likely occurred in spite of the logic of educational organization. Few younger teachers, particularly, have ever had a grounding in methods and exercises best adapted to teaching writing, and this is especially true of the mechanics of unity and coherence, transition devices, and effective emphasis. Even veteran teachers are largely self taught, with the result that teachers of writing generally share neither a common philosophy nor a basic core of techniques. Given the diversity of attitudes, experience and background on a typical high school staff, acceptable writing can become almost any process of putting down words on paper, as if it matters not what kind of writing one is taught, so long as something is.

The lack of consensus on the nature and place of writing has not been helped by the increasingly widespread practice of hiring teachers whose first responsibility is coaching the school track, volleyball or football teams, and filling out their teaching assignments by slotting them into the humanities. Youngsters now graduate from high school, spend four or five years acquiring a jock's grasp of literature and communication, and wind up standing in front of students only slightly younger and less educated than themselves. No matter: sports are prominent among a family of activities and diversions which are thought to be conducive to school spirit, keeping kids happy and helping to minimize complaints. This weighs significantly among educators, given the short term demands of survival. That is why there is so much emphasis on extracurricular activity and high school athletic programs, and so much lip service to organizing and transmitting information.

There is more. In thirty years as a teacher and librarian in three provinces, I have never been in a school where there was not at least one English teacher, and sometimes more than one, who often gave no writing assignments at all, although this seems to have had more to do with reducing marking loads than with philosophy. One can only hope that such anomalies will not increase should high school students who require remedial training in writing when they get to university wind up as teachers of writing, disposed to believe that skill in written communication is over-rated, and that the love of books (in the Information Age!) is where the action should be. We have already paid dearly for that mistake in emphasis.

There is sufficient reason, therefore, to question the many evasions and rationalizations professionals commonly offer to explain away the problem of functional illiteracy whenever they cannot simply ignore it. Writing, to repeat, is crystallized thinking. Whether the outcome of a logical, valid thought sequence is stored on a printed page or on a computer disc makes no difference to the structure of the thought. Someone has still to work out the process from evidence or premises to conclusion and transmit the result to someone else. The nature of logical thought has not changed since the Greeks; we have improved our descriptions of it, and found new applications, but we cannot change it. Given a valid structure and true premises, the conclusion must follow. It must be expressible in language. Literate students, therefore, will always have to be taught to do exposition properly.

It is essential to stress here that the issues I am raising are not issues of basic competence. Language teachers with a cursory background in communications or with a heavy bias in literature, do not necessarily lack many necessary teaching techniques, still less sufficient gray matter. They can learn, and possibly would, if the demands of the Compact permitted it. It is grossly irresponsible to leave the young teacher to her own resources in determining what adequate instruction in writing is, yet that is exactly what is almost universally done. Our task will be to determine how the mechanics of educational organization make this isolation inevitable.

The linchpin of expository writing is the paragraph, and the type of paragraph that teachers of English most often fail to take seriously contains a main idea and key, supporting detail arranged in a some logical sequence, transition devices between ideas and sentences, and a conclusion which sums up and advances the main idea. Given that neither high school teachers nor their graduates seem to share a common philosophy or grounding in writing, what forms of writing have they been exposed to? Foremost among them has to be the descriptive paragraph. Students begin their first exposure to writing with this form in the elementary grades, and it repeat it year after dreary year throughout high school.

Who has not suffered from student effusions about the Little White Cloud? This paradigm of empty rhetoric invariably begins with a topic sentence stating a phoney idea (a controlling idea that fails to control anything): "A lonely little white cloud was the sole feature of the blue western sky". There is not the slightest pretense here of an intention to inform or convince, no key which will lead to a conclusion to be supported in detail. All the writer can do is to continue with whatever random ideas come to mind, given only this loose association with clouds, and proceed to barf adjectives all over the page. The teacher is sure to be treated with a sudden Armaggedon of flashes of lightning, peals of thunder, and sheets of rain, as the heavens visit their wrath upon the earth. Serenity and calm will return presently, however, and the conclusion, if it can be called that, will find the Little white Cloud still intact, but this time drifting quietly into the eastern sky.

Any functional illiterate can rattle off such nonsense. They can also produce reams of the next offense to good writing: the phoney narrative. Sometimes rationalized as "creative writing", high school narratives also invite the student to fill a page with adjectival overkill. Invariably, the narrator will have encountered a fearsome apparition in a dark alley, typically complete with bloody fangs, unkempt red hair, copious amounts of saliva, and a single large eye in the centre of the forehead. Again, the writer will simply spin out the next monstrous thing that comes to mind, since nothing in the topic sentence requires him to marshal evidence in support.

The phoney narrative provides an essential insight into the nature of descriptive paragraphs. Teachers often refer to description as a "type" of paragraph writing, but in fact description is merely a technique. The archetypal description follows a little bug who makes his way from the bottom to the top of a plant, looking first to one side then to the other, for details. Thus descriptive paragraphs are generally narrative in structure. Lapse of time constitutes the only true link between what comes before and what follows, hence the random nature of the detail, and the temptation to avoid inevitable boredom by drawing an extravagantly vivid word picture.

Paragraph writing to inform or convince, in contrast, requires a main idea and a key detail which requires supplementation, not at random, but with details which must appear in a logical rather than merely temporal order, or at least in an order according to their importance. A conclusion must be drawn, and attention paid to the various devices which enable the reader to make transitions from sentence to sentence, and which recall the central idea. Unity and coherence are thus essential to the conveyance of information. All this should seem self-evident, but clearly these concepts are not universally shared by all people currently teaching English composition, and the reader will be lucky to uncover a high school writing program which assumes them, if indeed it is even possible to find anything which would qualify as a coherent writing program.

To the extent that the descriptive paragraph offers some useful elements in the management of language, it is better assigned to pre-high school language classes. My exclusive concern here is with secondary school writing instruction and its perceived shortcomings. (I am not about to deny that there is an urgent need for consensus and expertise in the earlier grades, and for a consistent 14-12 approach to writing.) Description ought not to be the bread and butter staple in writing that it currently appears to be in high school teaching, since this invites the trivialization of writing and adds nothing to a capacity to structure thinking.

The prevalence of the descriptive paragraph owes largely to the fact that it is one of the few forms which the uninstructed can cope with, giving the teacher something that all 35 of his charges can do, whether they need to or not. It allows the teacher to claim that he has attended to the matter of writing instruction, and to disclaim any responsibility for the university entrants whose skills are so publicly inadequate. The descriptive paragraph, and the phoney narrative of which it is an extension, is not alone, however, in the list of bogus candidates competing for recognition as legitimate forms of writing. The ubiquitous research paper is also over-rated as a vehicle of language instruction.

The student will first meet the research paper in the elementary grades. It will usually take the form of an assignment requiring as much as twenty-five pages of text on a random topic, often without any significant amount of preparation in information-gathering. It will require the pupil to abstract extensive passages from an assortment of texts, paraphrase them loosely, and string them together more or less in sequence.

The research paper will reappear in the senior grades, although often now with at least some instruction in the bibliographical techniques appropriate to research (the preparation of subject file cards, bibliographies, footnotes, and so on). No doubt the process of information-gathering is part of the business of writing: one has at least to have something to write about, particularly a general thesis requiring support. But writing is much more than merely paraphrasing the language and ideas of others, and the research paper, as it stands, is not a legitimate writing form in the requisite sense. Most of the university's functional illiterates will have had to prepare research papers in high school. What they will not have had is a grounding in digesting gathered material, reshaping it, forming a specific impression or thesis, and marshalling support in their own words. The high school research paper will not, of itself, do enough to nourish these skills.

Notwithstanding the limited value of the research paper, it may be the only extensive sortie into writing that many Grade Twelve students receive. It will be the cornerstone of student writing in their final semesters, supplemented at best by a few paragraphs, character sketches or editorials. In the absence of a coherent overall teaching scheme, the value of such exercises is indeterminate. Character sketches, for example, are often merely thinly disguised descriptive paragraphs. It should not be surprising that student writing experience is almost uniformly fragmentary.

Worse yet, there is the matter of how functional illiteracy is to be defined. Educators repeatedly talk of the functionally illiterate as those who cannot decipher the address on an envelope, read street or traffic signs, or write their names. Efforts are proposed to meet the needs of those who have "fallen through the cracks". Notice that the public is not likely to blame educators because the system has allowed a few illiterates to slip though the net. Such people are by implication the exception, which suggests conveniently that the system need only be find-tuned, not changed in significant ways.

Yet the inability to use language effectively goes far beyond the basket cases described above. One should question just why educators typically gloss over any stress on a wider definition. I can recall an ancient staff room conversation inspired because the university had identified our school as one of the schools (there were many) who had graduated at least a few students whose performance was significantly below par. The claim was dismissed out of hand: we graduate so many more students now than we used to, so it is hardly surprising that more students of marginal ability get to the university. Three to five minutes of conversation disposed of the subject forever.

Strangely enough, the sorry state of training in writing not only fails to attract serious attention, but is instinctively glossed over. When the Saskatchewan Department of Education first tried to amend its literacy program it sought first to reduce time spent in English classes on writing, opting instead for farming out writing among the various other disciplines. Curiously, there was not a whisper about a concomitant upgrading of communication teaching skills across the curriculum to support the revised approach. Well now, if the specialists have such a. mixed record of teaching students to handle written language effectively, how are Science or Auto mechanics instructors to do better? The logic of survival, however, will not permit the raising of that question. Writing is writing is writing.

Presumably each discipline will have a form of writing appropriate to it, and certainly it would help to require students to produce formal writing in a variety of disciplines. But any improvement in student performance, not to mention a teacher's performance, will not just happen by itself. What should we make then of proposals by teacher's professional organizations to reduce the number of compulsory English courses, apparently to satisfy demands for more attention to fine arts and dance? One assumes that if a student cannot advance an idea from Point A to Point B it will be enough if he can flit between them.

The public may talk about it. Universities may complain. But the prospect of a serious evaluation of the performance of public education in the teaching of writing never surfaces on professional days or education conventions. No resolutions respecting it ever appear in professional councils, other than denials. Not in thirty years; not in any of the three provinces I have taught in during my career. The matter is simply never alluded to, although there can hardly be an educator unaware of the numbers and of the public's exasperation.

Public education is confronted with a serious question about its performance in an area so central that it defines (together with mathematics) the reason for its existence. The rational response would naturally be to define the problem, determine the steps needed for a proper resolution, and proceed to implement them. Nothing of the kind appears to be taking place, and we need to ask why.

An answer must not oversimplify by considering only the situation of those (the public) whose welfare the professionals ostensibly exist to serve. The professionals execute their mandate subject to economic, political and social constraints, and the first people educational organizations serve are the professionals themselves. In theory, there must be an environment which attracts the most capable and allows them to pursue the goals which best serve the public interest. In practice, professional organizations spend most of their time defending professionals, leaving the public frustrated in its efforts to make schools accountable.

There is a pervasive temptation to fix the blame for this perceived failure on individuals, depending upon one's bias, but there is good reason to be suspicious of this tendency. The problem with trying to explain historical events, for example, by tracing the careers of inspired or stupid heads of state or generals, is that such a procedure sacrifices predictability. History becomes a largely random series of accidents, depending on the complex of personalities who happen to be on the scene. It will be more useful to ask why educational organizations keep thrusting only certain kinds of people into positions of prominence, and why typical solutions to organizational problems have the characteristics they do. This will bring us closer to understanding the purposes the organization is really serving, and why it is so resistant to change.

The prospect of Blame for any shortcomings radiates a subtle paralysis through the educational system. There will be attempts to localize Blame in one quarter so that everyone else can go to ground, leaving only the exposed to dangle in the breeze. Librarians will be familiar with this. Raise the question of library use, for example, and no one will ever ask whether teachers are factoring library resources into their courses. Rather, administrators will ask the librarian: have you surveyed students to find out what they want? Are you sure that you are being friendly and welcoming? Are you functioning appropriately as a Role Model? These questions keep the ball in the librarian's court, directing attention away from teachers and administrators generally, and encouraging the assumption that the problem is local and limited to the library, not requiring extensive change elsewhere. Better to let one person, rather than the whole staff, take the heat.

It is not always possible to isolate problems so readily, and since assigning Blame can raise questions about professional competence, educators will try to ignore the literacy problem rather than admit that it exists and allow the public to raise the question of who has to deal with it. The classroom teacher will resent being the fall guy, not without reason. However much the teacher's lack of preparation complicates things, administrators, colleges of education, school boards and Departments of Education also share responsibility. If poorly prepared teachers are part of the problem someone has allowed them to move into the system, and has failed to train them in the specific skills, techniques and assignments needed to get results.

Blame percolates down as various elements exercise their ability to avoid it (which ability defines their turf and place in the pecking order--those at the top less liable than those at the bottom). The terror is compounded because, typically, the English teachers cannot agree on whether there is a problem, and certainly cannot arrive at a consensus, and their administrators--as often as not lacking a background in humanities--would hardly know which analysis to listen to anyway. Better to pretend that there is no problem. Better to allow the teachers to retreat behind the classroom doors and, in the name of professional freedom, leave them to their own resources, provided, of course, that no problems spill out of the classroom and into the main office, where they may require public attention.

Nothing galvanizes administrators as quickly as the prospect of disorder and the attendant notoriety. Academic achievement will always receive well-meaning lip service, but anomalies in discipline kill inspire action, usually focusing on the inexperienced or new teacher in various ways. School districts may even hire experts to help the teacher manage quiet classes, but the troops in the trenches know well that one central function of the expert is to determine what the teacher needs to do, or where the teacher went wrong, so it is better to avoid such unwelcome attention. The reward will be non-interference.

Non-interference means either that there will be no pressure to change or that changes will be largely cosmetic. Efforts at public relations through sports and school activities will intensify. There would be nothing wrong with this if the tactic bought time to identify the literacy problem and take steps to deal with it. But no one is about to admit the existence of functional illiteracy in their back yard, and any success the public relations effort enjoys merely puts off an eventual reckoning.

However, the heart of a solution may not lie in how material is packaged and students handled, but in scholarship, although educators are at some pains to avoid stressing this. It does not inspire public confidence to admit that the professionals themselves are uncertain or divided about what to do.

Students who are in awe of the teacher's knowledge, assuming at least a minimal ability to impart it, will feel better served and show greater respect than they will if the teacher is a manipulator, working deviously and desperately to keep out of trouble by keeping students busy and entertained. Students know when they are learning. It is not an accident, however, that most teacher training focuses almost entirely on methodology. Few teachers would dare to link mastery over their subject matter to classroom management; it is more attractive to seek for a magic wand (a surefire literature title, an eccentric seating arrangement, various group activities) than to admit to, or make up, deficiencies in one's education.

It is a fact that a teacher with little to offer students can get by with management techniques which keep students from complaining. I have heard many a student joke about how little they have to do in this or that class, and even boast to having transferred there to avoid someone else who makes them work harder. Often if a student feels a little overwhelmed by other classes, and a slack teacher is also a generous marker, the student usually won't object to having a soft touch. But most students will know that they are being short-changed.

In the end, most people seem glad to strike a bargain: keep classroom problems private, and few will question the value of what is happening there. Anonymity equals competence, and the classroom teacher relies on his superiors to keep unwanted irritants to a minimum. He wants to be alone in his castle, secure in the assumption that no one will question his performance or competence by raising the issue of Blame for any of the school's graduates who test out poorly for literacy at university or in employment.

Note that the Office Mafia will be as beleaguered as the teacher. Abusive parents, school board members, or authoritarian Directors will add to the pressures on administrators and councilors. Students may be poorly behaved, even violent, for a number of reasons; home problems (working parents, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, abuse, divorce, drugs) may engage all the energies of administrators and student advisors. There is, however, an upside to all this. Whether the school can usefully attempt to solve all these problems or not, their existence and the legitimate and even heroic struggle against them provides a moral imprimatur for the existence of the Office Mafia, legitimizing its claim to independence, a secure turf, and the right to determine how responsibility and thus Blame shall be assigned.

The normally legitimate presence of significant financial, administrative and social complications, by fully engaging Mafia energies, affords, therefore, a convenient and plausible excuse to avoid looking too closely into the classroom. This will enable the Mafia to make good on its commitment to respect a narrow interpretation of classroom freedom while implicitly justifying the refusal to accept direct responsibility, with its potential for having to accept some Blame, for such internal and non-disciplinary matters as the form and content of a writing program.

How can problems impinging on the classroom teacher (especially class size) be avoided when administrators and councilors have so many burdens to cope with? We (the Office Mafia) will concentrate on our problems, you in the classroom on yours. Who else do we exist to serve? You will be free from interference so long as you keep up your end of the bargain. We cannot avoid some impact on your routines in the course of our work, but things would be much worse for you if we didn't keep so many distractions at bay. Don't complain if conditions in the classroom seem at times more complicated than they should be.

If a current social stress didn't exist, the Mafiosi would have to invent one.

It is essential to the Compact that the teacher be guaranteed anonymity within the classroom provided she goes about her business and attracts the least attention. Teachers and administrators thus mark out their respective turfs, to be invaded only in peril. Outsiders (who may include inspectors, parents, censors or even librarians) are to be kept at an arm's length, and may enter the private domain of the teacher only under controlled conditions.

Thus do all endeavor to further their survival. The beauty of the arrangement lies in the way everyone concerned is allowed to be as truthful and honest as their lights allow, while preserving self-interest all around, The cost of the arrangement, however, is prohibitive. Everyone involved may work under the same roof or in the same school district; they may talk of the pursuit of excellence or of teamwork, everyone working together to a common end. Much of this is facade. In reality, the denizens of a school are like Leibniz's monads, each following a private destiny but appearing to interact. Externally a grand public enterprise, privately a lonely grind toward retirement. This is the price to be paid for insulating professionals from criticism for the performance of their charges.

As a first step in solving the literacy problem, school boards need to give teachers of writing enough spare, or released, time to do what needs to be done and still retain sanity. If there is a prejudice, on the part of parents and boards, that teachers already have cushy jobs and overlong vacations, that will undermine reform at the outset. Other teachers, too, will have to accept the need of teachers of writing for more released time.

No doubt some of the decline in the quality of writing instruction can be attributed to increasing class sizes and the prospect of prohibitively heavy marking loads. It is also true that attitudes born of a generation of television watching may have done something to complicate a systematic approach to writing instruction. Violence in the classroom may furnish further excuses. Maintaining the needed level of writing practice, even under normal teaching conditions, means some late evenings and weekends sacrificed to correcting papers.

Nevertheless, teachers of writing need to be held accountable, and not allowed to rationalize shortcomings solely in terms of external pressures. They need to give assurances that the stiffer standards are being met. It is no use to be forever relaxing in the staff room during spares and expecting other staff to accept the argument that an adequate writing program is being implemented. If the assurance is forthcoming, and standardized tests and university performance of graduates provide at least an indirect measure of progress, opposition can be treated as petty obstruction by the envious. Jealous colleagues can to told that if they want similar perks, they can give evidence of the same attention to writing.

At least some of the blame for the decline of the quality of writing instruction can be laid squarely on Colleges of Education, which often show the same bias favouring literature over communication of information. The reality is that university teachers too appear to find the "grind" of composition boring, mute testimony to their own halfhearted approach to the subject. The coming public revolt over the failure of schools to deal with functional illiteracy will not be boring, however.

Teachers of communication should beware of a narrow specialization in literature. A dilettante background in literature is the bane of English teaching, particularly as it places the entire onus for developing the knowledge and techniques of a communications program entirely on the shoulders of isolated and inexperienced beginners. It is irresponsible to place the burden of reform (assuming, against all evidence, that there is any agreement on what is needed) on those least capable of assuming it, yet that is nearly a universal practice.

Departments and boards of education ought to demand specific writing objectives on the part of teachers, and a basic core of accepted exercises and techniques. Why haven't they? They ought to implement standardized testing at various levels, correlating to objective standards rather than to merely average results in other jurisdictions. Why won't they? Any valid approach to the teaching of writing should be able to furnish at least some effective, if indirect, measure of progress. And why do the progressives, even while maintaining that all subject disciplines should stress writing (the better to undercut the traditional compulsory status of English and History) always pay obeisance to the Compact by never asking whether there is a need to teach all teachers "across the curriculum" how to teach writing?

Subjective teacher evaluations of progress in writing are simply not enough. If a skill can't be measured independently, at least in part, we are only bluffing in claiming progress, yet teachers are seldom taught how to measure significant improvements in student performance. Tests do not need to cover the entire spectrum of possible skills, but they should be able to provide at least a partial vindication of any approach to writing. Satisfying the public demand for at least some objective justification is the best way of ensuring that confidence in allowing individual professional judgment to take us the rest of the way will be well-founded.

Objective measures, standardized tests and techniques, and thorough training are not the death of professional freedom, but its foundation. Only the weak try to cling to the security of the Compact in the desperate hope of surviving long enough to reach retirement: you in your small corner, and I in mine. Apres moi le deluge.