Historical Rhetorics/Should We Read Quintilian?/Stewart, Donald C. "The Legacy of Quintilian." ''English Education'' 11.2 (1979): 103-17. Print

Stewart, Donald C. "The Legacy of Quintilian." English Education 11.2 (1979): 103-17. Print

Donald Stewart’s “The Legacy of Quintilian” highlights a current issue with English teaching practices, through an example of his daughter learning parts of speech, and he illustrates “the legacy” of Quintilian’s work on rhetoric and education in order to discuss the issue of the “back to basics movement” in teaching English. Stewart argues that Quintilian’s rhetoric and education influence current teaching practices in English Composition; he argues although these practices where useful in its time they are not useful now. Stewart explicates Quintilian practices through Hugh Blair and argues that this rhetorical theory is present when thinking/teaching composition and control “current-traditional thinking about rhetoric and composition” and although they have paved the way for this area the teaching models are outdated. Stewart argues that “composition is not a discipline whose features are reducible to a few simple propositions but that it is a discipline with a rich and complicated history…that is now experiencing an intellectual vigor” (116). Stewart believes that these teaching models will progress, with time, and in order to do so educators, specifically in English Composition, need to have a better understanding of the history of rhetoric.