Principles of a Classical Writing Program: Mimesis

There is no manner in which instruction in the modern classroom differs so much from its classical antecedents than in the way that the task of writing is related to the task of reading.

In the modern school, that relation can be defined primarily as an analytical one. A student reads a text, and then is asked to write about that text. The student’s task is to explain or interpret material that is presented to him for that purpose.

But in the classical school, the relation between writing and reading was primarily a mimetic one. A student read a text, and then was asked to write like that text. The works they read were presented explicitly as models for their own writing.

This difference in the relation between reading and writing had vast consequences for the tenor of instruction in the past. For one, it meant that students had the opportunity to work in a variety of genres: poetry, oratory, narrative, epistles. These are forms of writing that emerge out of lived life. The modern student writes in one genre only, and it is a strictly academic one.

The kinds of writing students were asked to do in the past provided scope for stylistic brio. They could play with voice, figure, and rhythm. This meant that their imaginative and aesthetic sensibilities were trained through their writing instruction. The analytical essay allows no scope to stylistic play, meaning that those sensibilities receive no enhancement through their writing instruction.

Most crucially, the analytic essay compels students to regard the works they study as artefacts, to be examined and dissected. It turns great books into dead things. But the mimetic approach to writing invites students to look on themselves as apprentices, emulating the works of the masters. It makes writing instruction a constant induction into a living tradition.