Nostalgia

So I was reading through the Rose article put here on webct fo us to read for tonight, and I was struck by something. Nostalgia seems to be one of the dominant rhetorical techniques in our talk of education, particularly when we talk about how education is failing. There's a blind yearning for the good old days, in which education meant something, students could read and write, and all the rest. Rose pointed out very accurately that this same argument has been going on for more than a century in this country, all the while more and more people are attending and graduating from college.

The good old days never really existed, they've just become a rhetorical strategy to use when arguing for changing something in education. Not just in education either, so much of social policy is filled with arguments of nostalgia. Nostalgia is essentially a conservative argument, yearning for the past rather than striving for the future. This is interesting in the broader concept of rhetoric from a traditional perspective. A traditional perspective, from the classical through the modern has been that the purpose of rhetoric is to change things for the better. How do we rectify this greater purpose aiming for the future with the prevalence and power of looking to the past as a technique?