Composition and Civic Education.

This paper addresses civic educators on the left, who "babble" about liberation and empowerment by transformative intellectuals. The paper argues that many of those "leftists" belong to the group that could be called "boss" compositionists, comfortable lower managers of a corrupt system, who never tire of denouncing the traditional or of advertising their own alleged revolution in composition. The paper states that (1) "boss" compositions can produce little evidence that they have improved students' writing more than their denigrated predecessors improved it; (2) the liberators and empowerers have done little to improve the lot of the graduate students and other contingent workers who actually teach composition; (3) the intellectual quality of their heralded discipline is unremarkable; (4) by their careerism, the boss compositions have duplicated the wider society's brutal division of haves and have nots; and (5) in consequence the deepest lesson of the revolution in composition is the lesson of upward mobility in the main stream, the lesson of going along to get along. The paper offers three brief examples to substantiate these points, two of which are recent books about the subject. (TB)