Composing Progress in the United States: Race Science, Social Justice, and the Rhetorics of Writing Assessment, 1845-1859

Abstract

While a growing literature explores the indebtedness of educational testing initiatives in the United States to so-called “race sciences” like eugenics, the role of race science in the history of writing assessment remains underexplored. Indeed, few histories of writing assessment even explicitly discuss race, racism, or social justice. Complicating existing portraits of the assessment past, this archival study reveals how beliefs about racial progress and justice complexly shaped the emergence of writing assessment in the antebellum United States. Writing assessment developed in response to anxieties about population and beliefs that writing could be employed to monitor and manage it, commonplaces promulgated by a then-popular science of race and mental measurement: phrenology. Though we often associate phrenology with examinations of the skull, not the page, leading phrenologists held that social environments like the writing classroom could exercise and expand the mind in ways that improved future generations. Among phrenology’s greatest American champions was Horace Mann, perhaps the country’s premier education reformer, who proposed that improvements in instruction and assessment could constitutionally revise the human body, augmenting mental capacity, eliminating physical disability, and protecting the racial body against decline. Between 1845 and 1859, he helped sponsor a series of writing assessment innovations, each regarded as a social justice intervention that furthered racial progress: written examination and score reporting to advance accountability, data disaggregation by racial group to advocate for fairness, written entrance examination to regulate college inclusion and inclusivity, and co-educational classroom writing assessment to inculcate virtue. Behind each innovation was a phrenological belief that writing externalized the mind’s capacities, such that appraisals of writing could be rhetorically repurposed to make claims about the student body’s racial worth. Working with colleagues on Boston’s School Examining Committees in 1845, Mann promoted and publicized the country’s first city-wide written examinations, intended to hold educators accountable for pedagogical failures that jeopardized their students’ evolutionary development. As part of this effort, Mann and his colleagues introduced new multimodal methods for reporting assessment results, visually representing the student body as a tabular body of errors. Comparing writing assessment data from Boston’s segregated white and black schools, Mann and his colleagues exposed racialized score gaps and advocated for increased racial fairness in education. Even so, their understandings of “fairness” reinforced racist narratives about black inferiority and left segregated schooling in place. Founding Antioch College in 1853, Mann mandated entrance examinations in English-language writing to police the gates of his new co-educational, racially integrated campus. This meritocratic standard for inclusion, however, was nested with phrenological assumptions about human worth. Finally, Antioch’s classrooms framed written composition in moral terms and introduced co-educational peer assessment to structure virtuous interactions between the sexes. In doing so, the writing classroom furthered one of Mann’s core goals for co-education: increasing students’ sexual criticality and restraint, virtues believed necessary for controlling population quality and quantity. Recovering these scenes enriches our understanding of writing education history by revealing how race science was fundamental to the emergence of writing assessment, and by clarifying how ostensibly “just” efforts to support student development can be vectors for eugenic assumptions, aims, and claims regarding the body’s value.