What made the teaching and learning experiences of a five-week pre-freshman composition primer course for minority students and a ten-session seminar on contemporary American literature for a group of teachers of English as a second language (ESL) from black and colored schools in South Africa so radically different for the professor who taught both courses? The answers transcended any obvious ones tied to the generic differences between the courses or the relative ages of the students in them. The answers lie at the nexus of politics, pedagogy, and language, and emerged from a heightened sense of language education as a political act. The typical freshman composition course unconsciously and counterproductively serves tradition-bound notions of cultural literacy. The crucial characteristic distinguishing the seminar participants from South Africa from the American minority students was their acute awareness of the sociological conditions and terms of their participation in the educational enterprise. In deciding to be teachers of English they had to accept the great political--hence pedagogical--compromise of the South African language policy. In the context of an oppressive culture they knew what it meant to have a right to your own language but to learn another nevertheless. They were in this crucial way better prepared to teach their minority students than teachers in American institutions. (RAE)