Even a quick tour through the professional literature of composition and rhetoric reveals that the profession has failed to bring about any real change in first-year college composition. The truth is that today the political and material conditions of first-year composition programs are not much different from that they were over a half century ago. Course loads have not become lighter and budgets have not become heavier. The point of this essay is not to dismiss a half century of dedicated and sincere efforts to rescue the system but rather to argue that perpetuating the status quo holds enormous, largely negative implications for both instructors and students. It may be that the discipline's efforts to rescue the current system has allowed it to remain firmly entrenched. Focusing on the composition class keeps the discipline invested in the current system and prevents it from reconceptualizing pedagogies and programs in literate practices. The discipline must abandon the current system in favor of one that: (1) would give the discipline a better chance of raising the status of writing instruction; and (2) would instruct students in the complexities and richness of literate practices as they occur in a variety of situations and for a variety of purposes. (Contains 32 references.) (TB)