All textbooks, regardless of their orientation or vocabulary, are equally unhelpful in the processes of teaching and learning writing. For the most part the textbooks seem to blend two sets of functions within the discipline of rhetoric as it is manifested in writing pedagogy. Whether it goes by the label "current-traditional" or "process-oriented," a pedagogy that confuses the taxonomic/managerial functions of rhetoric with its heuristic/epistemic functions will always focus on the analytical to the neglect of the synthetic, the product over the process. Assignments and standards should, therefore, grow out of the experiences of having-written and having-to-write, and not be appropriated as a set of abstractions found in textbooks. In addition, the classrooms should become workshops wherein apprentice writers and experienced instructors share the experience of writing, not the ordeal of reading about it and analyzing the finished products of others. Textbooks must not be replaced, but dislodged, not improved, but abandoned. No textbook should take the place of the teacher--a live and willing alchemist willing to bestow his or her own magic upon the apprentice writers. (HOD)