Relatively few areas of the work of a Subject Centre lend themselves to immediate outcomes or successful six-monthly reporting. This is certainly true of what from now on will be one of the core preoccupations of the English Subject Centre: the perceived and growing gulf between English as practised in school under the influence of National Curriculum, National Literacy Strategy and Curriculum 2000, and that practised in Higher Education. A number of individuals and groups are already concerning themselves with this gulf, and the Subject Centre is in the process of entering into dialogues with some of the relevant agencies – for example the English Association, and the National Association for the Teaching of English, as well as English lecturers within university education Departments.
One far from universal refrain of university English teachers concerns students being less well-prepared. This frequently becomes a lament over a widespread inability of even well-qualified students either to undertake strenuous reading or to recognise historical, mythological or religious allusion. At which point it is well to remind ourselves that the decline of high literacy has been a recurrent theme. Already in 1971 George Steiner was lamenting the demise of classical literacy, the inability to read older texts that were not presented on stilts of annotation. Over a generation earlier, analysing his ‘Practical Criticism’ protocols in 1928, I.A. Richards noted ‘lack of reading’ among the explanations for a widespread deficit in the ability to read poetry on the part of his Cambridge subjects:
A large number of writers showed clearly… that they had hardly any reading at all to serve them as a background and means of orientation.
None of which should lead to the complacency of ‘we’ve been here before’, or elide the specificities of our own moment. (What would Richards let alone his pupil Queenie Leavis have made of the National Literacy Strategy or the aggressive global marketing of anthologies?)
Sixth form teachers traditionally perceived themselves as part of a common project with university teachers, and in the mid to late 1980s, in the era of Literature/Teaching/Politics, of DUET and of the Verbal Arts Association, there were signs of a growing convergence between activities cross sector. But in fact the Cox Report and Ron Carter’s Language in the National Curriculum project may represent the last occasions on which senior subject academics were charged with shaping the National Curriculum for English, and the fate of both reports is instructive if depressing. School and university teachers have since 1989 been driven apart by the immediate preoccupations of their own community – in the case of school teachers the unrolling of all that followed from the National Curriculum and its statutory instruments, and in that of university teachers a collective determination to make literary and English studies as different as possible from the derided ‘common-sense’ assumptions of other reading publics. The result has been the emergence of two discrete tribes, each entertaining stereotypical views about the work of the other, instanced in the overheard exhortation to first years on the lines of ‘you’re not in the sixth form now’. Perhaps university lecturers should spend more time with the National Curriculum and QCA websites as a preparation for engaging in dialogue with their beleaguered state school colleagues.
But we need to look beyond the experience of that minority of AS/A2 students who come to university to read one or other variety of English honours. The procession of policies, strategies, and instruments that marched through the 1990s entailed major epistemic and cultural consequences. Between them they enact a fundamental shift towards prescription; the enhancement of the extract culture, and a shift in reading practices – the literacy strategy itself perhaps oddly collusive with the visual and aural culture occupied by the majority of students. We are talking, as Bethan Marshall argued in her address to the Condition of the Subject Conference (a transcript of 29 Articles which is reproduced here on page 30), about a paradigm shift in secondary English studies.
At one level, the rhetoric is all in favour of adventurous readers and learners. The National Curriculum announces of pupils at Key Stage 4: ‘They are keen readers who can read many kinds of text and make articulate and perceptive comments about them.’ But the theories in use which students adopt to manage their own learning are perhaps analogous to creoles - hybrid forms adapted at the borders of two language communities. What students internalise, from the mechanistic matching of inputs and outcomes, may well be a distrust of uncertain outcomes and an understanding of knowledge in terms of information, a cognitive disposition which sits particularly uncomfortably with the objects of the Englishspectrum disciplines. From the experience of non-stop assessment regimes they have extrapolated, many of them, the need to demonstrate ‘knowledge about’ rather than, say, that propensity to ‘weigh the importance of alternative perspectives’ or ‘handle information and argument in a critical and selfreflective manner’ recommended by the English Benchmark. The unitised model of cognition (visible paradigmatically at the level of the dominance of anthology and extracts, and syntagmatically at the level of narratives of learning) is at odds with the sophisticated pattern making and cognitive risk taking which higher education should foster. At the least, learning to learn in prescriptive formulae is a poor foundation for an HE committed (at least in the rhetoric of qualification framework and level descriptors) to the development of autonomous learners. For a subject preoccupied by perspectives, audiences, and multiple meaning, the unitisation of learning represents a form of modernity. It provides security and a narrative of linear progress (neither of them, needless to say, contemptible properties) at the cost of experimentation or the tolerance of uncertainty. Such an incremental, ‘safe’, but ultimately constricted protocol for knowing has radical implications for English-related subjects.
As indicated above, many groups and individuals are working to re-open the pathways between English at different educational levels. It is very much part of the brief of the English Subject Centre to lend its support to that necessary adventure.
Newsletter Issue 6 - February 2004
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