Until Dr. Rockwood, one of my college professors, pointed it out to me recently, I never really grasped how much the teaching of literature and composition is based on structure, not content. As I look back over my education, I can see that most teachers had asked me questions about the plot of a novel or told me how to use comparison and contrast effectively in my writing; very few had been concerned with what the novel was about at its deeper levels or what ideas could be communicated in order to make writing more effective. Content was often only acknowledged in passing by some tired, old admonition to "relate" the novel or essay to one's own "personal experience."
The nature of the problem seems to be the assumption that content in any communication is inherently conscious, a thing that every student knows very well, while structure is not inherent, but something the student must learn. This assumption igonores the fact that the content of any communication—its ideas, feelings, insights—has been an unconscious thing that becomes conscious through a process of symbolization called language. Any idea, feeling, or insight I have ever had came from an unconscious process that pieced together familiar experience into complex relationships. These relationships can become conscious only when they are given concrete names or symbols by our conscious use of language. In other words, CONTENT IS UNCONSCIOUS for the most part until our mind gives it structure and consciousness by SYMBOLIZING IT WITH LANGUAGE. The complex relationship of teacher to student would be a semiconscious or unconscious group of experiences until it is given its names—teacher and student. But once so designated, it has from then on structure and meaning and can be used in defining other roles such as, for example, parent and child. Since language is learned by most people by the age of five, it leads me to assume that content is something present from the beginning in all of us, as is the ability to express the content in some structure made possible by language.
The English teacher need only point out to the student the content that is already structured to make the student more aware and skillful at finding content in literature or creating content in his compositions. Dreams and intense memories hold some of the richest content for the student. They are the intimate associatons and relationships that the one has structured in the mind and can further structure with language in communicating with others. Dreams and memories hold great personal meaning. One's conscious mind might not understand the exact meaning but dreams and memories are the content that evokes strong emotion and interest. These are starting points for which one can speculate about their unconscious meaning and structure. As one becomes adept at interpreting or analyzing this content, one will be better able to see how others use the same symbols and structures—or closely related ones—in a common language to express their ideas, feelings, and insights.
There are, of course, certain weaknesses in using personal dreams and memories in composition exercises. The student may deal with the analysis of literature or the subjects for composition in so personal a way as to lose objectivity. The teacher must be conscious enough, and so must the student, to make distinctions between illuminating personal experience in relation to literature and composition and the narrow subjectivity that keeps the reader and writer from experiencing other ideas and perspectives. Personal feelings about the Viet Nam war are fine when the student is reading or writing about how war affects the individual, but they might not be fine when reading or writing a reasoned argument for a change in national policy concerning the Viet Nam war.
A content approach to teaching any form of communication implies rightly the importance of content before form. It realizes that a person is not a storehouse of completely conscious processes to which the most effective structure must be applied the person wants to communicate. It realizes that in the mind there is the inherent unconscious process of refining all the diverse experiences received into complex associations and realtionships; the process continues into thes consciousness as this refined content is given symbolization through language. The process makes content and strcture inseparable. It makes interpretation of the unfamiliar experiences possible through analogy with familiar experiences—familiar content set forth in familar structure.
© Copyright 2002 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.