High school and college writing assignments encourage students to avoid every sense of purposeful self-involvement by directing all their attention to the world or to others. Perhaps teachers need to be reminded that, unless they give students the opportunity and occasion to focus on instrumental relationships between the world, other people and themselves, teachers are taking away from their students the very sense of their own lives as humans. If teachers were to reverse assignment techniques, structuring them to "subjectify" everything, directing them to demonstrate the practical, truly self-directed purposefulness of scholastic inquiry and academic activity, then they might find that students' work would improve dramatically to the extent that they realize that they have a personal stake in doing the assignments and doing them well. This procedural and attitudinal shift is from teaching and learning the subject to teaching and learning "through" the subject. (Appendixes contain an argument for strategic integrative learning experiences, a typology of required integrative-learning core courses, and a discussion of these two schemata in terms of writing instruction.) (HTH)