The meat of spatial approaches is the idea that the basic writer is a creation of the very institutions whose programs profess to serve them. Those who support this line of thinking feel BW once served the strategic function of changing the way the profession talked about remedial writers. However, discussions now serve to create and keep alive a basic writer ideology. There are arguments that call for abolishing BW programs. Some in the abolitionist camp, including Ira Shor, make a case for BW being nothing more than a “tool of oppression” (Mutnick 27).

In his 1992 paper, The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum, Bartholomae reflects on Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations to remind us of how and why BW came to be and the strategic function it once served. He describes Shaughnessy’s Errors as the “the quintessential liberal reflex,” and BW as “an extension” of a moment in [Shaughnessy’s] time; that Errors “preserves” her project. Bartholomae brings to the fore the idea that, because Shaughnessy’s work gave voice to “our founding desires to find, know, and help,” we run the risk, out of simple reverence for her work, of preserving Shaughnessy’s “version” of who the basic writer is and preserving BW for reasons that do not apply to the current context of composition studies. As such, we also risk being guilty of fitting students into Shaughnessy’s basic writer mold instead of applying our own “powers of revision and inquiry” to redefine these students.