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The classroom, is the place for the pupil to learn haw to use his own powers, and if the teacher usurps this, he is the meanest of tyrants-a tyrant over human souls.
William Mayo
At first glance, William Leonidas Mayo would not likely be a welcome figure at a contemporary NCTE convention. His classrooms were anything but decentered, and he would have scoffed at the idea that students had a right to their own language-unless that language was Standard English. The maverick founder and president of East Texas Normal College (1889), an independent teacher-training institution in rural Commerce, Texas, ruled his school with unquestioned authority, boxing unruly students about the ears, sending others home for infractions, and insisting upon exacting standards for English instruction. Whole weeks at the campus could be spent in debate on the finer points of prescriptive grammar, and woe to the student who used the subjective case where the objective case was required, in class or out. At the same time, Mayo advocated many practices that anticipated contemporary, student-centered, civically engaged pedagogy; he held that students' changing needs should drive curricula, that each student had a sacred dignity that schools must uphold, that practical, universal education was the basis for a democratic society, and that no student should be turned away for lack of academic preparation or funds. Eulogizing him in 1960, his most famous student, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Sam Rayburn, echoed the thoughts of many: "If it hadn't been for Mayo's college, his credit system, and his inspiration, I don't know where I'd be today" (25).
I realize there is a tendency in pedagogical histories toward either demonizing or heroizing past practitioners and practices. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I do see Mayo as an admirable figure, despite his flaws. In thirty years, he taught over thirty thousand students, building his college from a one-room schoolhouse into the largest center of teacher education in the state, outside the flagship University of Texas, and he did it without a penny of state or federal funds. (Shortly before his death in 1917, he arranged for transfer of the school to the state; it is now Texas A&M University-Commerce.) He had little patience...