ABSTRACT
Composition is a relative newcomer to the school curriculum. It was preceded by grammar, rhetoric, and even literature. The oldest grammar, by Dionysios of Thrace, was produced more than 2,100 years ago and was antedated only by Euclid’s book on geometry (Casson, 1985). This early grammar was a tool used to help decode the archaic words found in ancient texts. However, together with later Greek grammars, it became the foundation for Latin grammars of two premedieval grammarians, Donatus and Priscian, whose works dominated school grammar study throughout the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. By the Middle Ages, grammar had gone far beyond the status of mere tool. It had become the foundation of all knowledge. The beginning point of education in the seven liberal arts was the word. Grammar became, for most of the Middle Ages, the chief subject of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), which was key to the quadrivium. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that in the Middle Ages, grammar meant Latin grammar and was “often used as synonymous with learning in general, the knowledge peculiar to the learned class/' Not only was grammar viewed as the “gateway” to all of knowledge, it was thought to “discipline the mind and the soul at the same time, honing the intellectual and spiritual abilities'' that would enable reading and speaking “with discernment” (Huntsman, 1983, p. 59). In the 18th century, this idea of honing intellectual abilities seems to have been appropriated by the Scottish Common Sense philosophers who specialized in rhetoric and belles-lettres. By the end of the 19th century, according to Applebee (1974), “The pedagogical theory of mental discipline…held that the purpose of education was to exercise and train the mental faculties, in particular, the faculties of ‘memory’ and ‘reason’” (p. 6). By the time that English grammar (rather than Latin) began to be accepted for use in schools, it too was justified in terms of its power to train the faculty of reason.
