Engines Make No Sense in Pieces

My daughter once explained to me why most writing curricula have not worked for her. She explained that if the parts of an internal combustion engine were strewn on the ground all disconnected and out of order, each individual piece (such as a screw, a nut, a pipe, a wire) would do nothing to help her understand an engine. Each part may qualify as data, fact, or information; however, these parts not only are nonfunctional out of context but also meaningless.

Better it would be to introduce a working engine, pointing out the parts while explaining how they work together. My daughter recognizes the power of this whole to parts approach. After seeing the engine functioning, she would have a greater interest in the parts and a better understanding of how they function together.

Often we approach teaching in the parts to whole way. We begin with the pieces, the parts, strewn on the floor, defending all the time the analytical approach. However, without context there is no story, without story there is no meaning, without meaning there is no knowledge.

Most contemporary writing curricula present writing as a parts to whole process, where a system of sentences are constructed like Lincoln logs to make a cabin, but students cannot see the cabin for the logs. This analytical approach may be informative, but not not very inspiring or natural.

Scriptorium Writing is a whole to parts approach to learning. Students read excellent samples of writing for narration and discussion, then mimic the samples in their assignment. The topics of invention guide students to take an inventory of all they know on the subject of the assignment, and then the student has the freedom to begin with a whole idea before putting pencil to paper.

In Reorienting Rhetoric: The Dialectic of List and Story, John D. O'Banion tells us that Cicero anticipated:

"the disastrous direction toward which Western thought was moving, toward the separation of mind from body and of form from content, toward examining matters 'piecemeal.' To the contrary, Cicero argued that eloquence is not possible through any methodology that only separates (or analyzes) and does not also unite (or synthesize). For 'it is impossible to achieve an ornate style without first procuring ideas and putting them into shape, and at the same time . . . no idea can possess distinction without lucidity of style' (3.6.24). Cicero not only argued against dealing with matters in 'piecemeal' fashion, but he asserted that thought and form are inseparable." (63)

The best education should be incarnational, uniting mind and body, form and content, ideas and words.