Yet nothing much is really changing in the vast majority of public school and even college classrooms. The "practitioners," as Steve North calls them, who compose the huge majority of those teaching composition, continue to look not to the researchers and scholars in the field for their instructional guidance, but to people in the classrooms to the right and left of them, to what North calls teaching "lore." This "lore," drawing heavily upon presumed common sense and intuition, continues to emphasize formalism, drill, lecture, and strict management of in-class behavior, the remnants of the Prussian model that had so much to do with encouraging disciplinary specialization and the incrementalization of learning in the nineteenth century, eventually to succumb to a full scale "scientific management" of classroom instruction described so enthusiastically and chillingly by Ralph Tyler in the mid-twentieth century. 

Frankly, all our liberal prognostications about empowering students, giving students the right to their own language, holistic evaluation, liberatory pedagogy, and such, whatever the value of such advice, are simply bouncing off the rank and file teacher, who seems bulletproof to real change. Like our literature friends, who are quite successfully separating the nature of aesthetic texts from anything that makes any sense to anybody but a literature Ph.D., we, in our continuing intellectual apotheosis from what seems to be happening to most students in most classrooms, are excusing ourselves from doing what our real job should be: to influence education. 

If the intellectual leaders of our discipline are therefore impotent to effect real change, then where's the hope? 

The hope, as Orwell would say, lies with the proles. The practitioners will indeed move into a progressive pedagogy, one that includes all the attributes of writing as process, student-centeredness, and collaboration, but they will not do it because they are reading College English or attending 4C's. They will do it because the ground, quite literally, is shifting beneath their feet. 

The face-to-face, shoebox classroom is the culprit here. As an environment trying to support an effective learning ecology, it fails miserably. It's like the alley where the druggies hang out; you can detox the kid and put him in a halfway house and counsel him for years, but it you put him back in the hood and back in that alley, he will revert, sucked in by the forces of his environment. 

Same thing happens to the teacher who has been carefully brought out of the deceptively common-sensical and intuitive tenets of current-traditionalism and coercive instruction. Once she goes back into that box, facing those 25 hostiles who have been carefully taught, in the memorable phrase of Ira Shor, to expect education to be done to them, and who, as a condition of their environment, operate under the seductive pressures of the "underlife," as Robert Brooks phrases it, all informed bets are off. Many many teachers have reported to me that they've fallen off the wagon of "the new rhetoric" because, in so many words, what the eggheads at the University have come up with just won't work in the trenches. 

The problem, of course, is not with the eggheads or with the teachers, but with the trenches. We need to get both students and teachers out of those hundred-and-eighty-year-old trenches. I am confident that the pressures of a society becoming rapidly emeshed in digital communication will force the locked box of the classroom to open up, and eventually to break up and disappear. Formal learning will escape its cell block mentality and begin to pervade all aspects of society and living, just as the telephone is now practically a condition of hour-to-hour living. The current-traditional concept of "delivering" knowledge will, necessarily, morph into the postmodern concept of stimulating knowledge-making, of making life-long students knowledge workers who navigate the vicissitudes of a knowledge economy in ways that Mrs. Grundy, glowering and framed by her blackboard, could never imagine.