Colleges had long taught English composition. But how is composition research done? Professors who taught mathematics could be asked to do original calculations, professors who taught history could be asked to write academic articles about history, but what about professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should they research? The closest thing seemed to be English literature. [3]And so at the end of the 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited from English professors. This had two drawbacks: (a) a literary expert need not be a good writer, any more than an art historian needs to be a good painter, and (b) the object of writing now tends to be the literature, since "This is what the professor is interested in. High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable scholastic experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course ". [4] The literary component of the 3 R's then morphed into English, with the bizarre consequence that high school students now had to write about English literature - write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had published in their diaries for a few decades