Reinventing English

It is the nature and consequences of the process of change which are significant, and if they include reinventing the wheel (a much maligned practice!), so be it. (Holbrook)

Ways to connect

In E.M. Forster’s, Howard’s End, a central character, Margaret Schlegel, tries to reconcile the paradoxes she sees in the world around her, between the masculine, materialistic, money-dominated world of the Wilcoxes – full of telegrams and anger – and the world of the Schlegel family who value above all else, the inner life, art, literature and personal relationships. Margaret says that it is her purpose, not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them. To build a rainbow bridge between the contrasting worlds around her. Only connect is the novel’s epigraph.

This has to be our purpose here. To connect and reconcile the prose and the passion, the rigour with the excitement of English.  It is important to begin by accepting that we live in a world of dualisms. There are very few simple answers. In schools we are obliged to follow government rules, match league table expectations, and demonstrate we can deliver the Ofsted inspection’s tick list. In our own minds we try to hold on to what we believe learners’ (and ourselves) really need. Helen Keller’s English teacher, Annie Sullivan, gives us a starting point – and at the same time allows us to  own up to which wheel it is we desperately want to reinvent: no amount of language training will enable … our children to use language with ease and fluency unless they have something clearly in their minds which they want to communicate, or unless we awaken in them a desire to know what is in the minds of others.

Whose English is it anyway?

In 1945 the then Government promised that everyone would be educated, or as one of Lee Hall’s characters in The Pitmen Painters (2007) puts it, they’re not gonna leave yer Shakespeare and yer Goethe just for the upper classes now. Hall says he wrote the play because the promise has been broken and as a result an opportunity has been missed. Real art is communal and active; it is not owned by anyone but should be the intellectual and emotional air we breathe. The more people who take part, the richer it is, and for every person excluded the poorer we become. 

English is an art too, like any other area of learning.  It’s not about utilitarianism, but it is rather, as Holbrook would have it, about the pursuit of meaning. If returning to 1945 is seen as reinventing the wheel, then we need to recognise that reinventing the wheel is a much maligned activity. And we need to do it now. The Pitmen Painters, through their teacher Robert Lyon, came to believe that by becoming painters they could change the way they learned. 

If it’s a wheel made by someone who works on the principle that it is a teacher’s job to be docile transmitters of knowledge aimed at docile and culture-free learners, (Rosen) then there is a problem. This is not who we are as teachers. If it’s another wheel –  David Holbrook’s, or Paulo Freire’s, or Peter Abbs’, or Arthur Applebee’s or Robert Eaglestone’s – then so be it. We can work with that. That pressure teachers feel from above has led to a situation where Gradgrind’s long shadow seems to have found its way into a good number of classrooms disguised as ‘rigour’. It promotes a cowering use of language, not just in the shadow of Squeers and Gradgrind, but also  in the shadow of the Classics, where it is ‘ treated as a dead language, idealized, codified, monolithic, written not spoken.‘ The fact that language is creative as well as subject to formal structures seems to have been elbowed aside in favour of a tough backdoor ‘back to basics’ approach. An approach that those who make the rules believe English should be, rather than what it is.  

Gerard Genette wrote about reading that, …the real author of the narrative is not only he who tells it, but also, at times even more he who hears it. We need to aspire to make learners not just consumers of but also producers of language and learning. Learning is a two-way process: teacher and student; the utilitarian and the personal, active as well as passive. Learning, in Applebee’s terms, is a conversation. Or to put this in even blacker and whiter terms, the development of certain technical skills has been the normal yard-stick for ‘progress’ in English. It is a proper one, but disastrously narrow (Radley). He wrote this in 1972. The same wheel, the same attempts at reinvention. The same absence of consensus.

Peter Hyman said recently that English teaching has become not just unbalanced, it has become unhinged – often toxic, dominated by Ofsted inspections, high-stakes exams and the crowding out of creativity. He says that an assessment system that labels 30% of learners failures every year, after twelve years in school, is not just wasteful, it’s vindictive. He concludes with Andreas Scheicher, of the OECD, who believes that the UK system is designed to produce second class robots.    

Instead, English should be seen as a condition of existence, rather than a subject of instruction (Sampson). Abbs expands on this when he wrote, in 1978: Our educational system is pathologically abstract…obsessed with the classification of knowledge and children alike. We need to develop the whole person, to make him passionately intelligent, and intelligently passionate.

Does all this begin to explain the puzzle of declining English Literature student numbers in schools – an overall decline of 31% across the three A level subjects between 2012 and 2019 and 13.5% of that reduction in 2018 and 2019? Is this the result of a return to a narrow practical approach to studying English in schools? The way teachers are directed to teach English places an emphasis on what Applebee calls, knowledge-out-of-context – which leads to students turning their backs on the subject. Polanyi describes the student experience as being forced to learn the rules without ever being allowed to ride the bicycle.

Building Foster’s rainbow bridge 

This might start with an exploration of some of these ideas:

• Aplebee characterises learning under two broad headings: knowledge-out-of- context and knowledge-in-action. The first type of learning is the sort that requires lots of memorising and recitation. The second sort, knowledge-in-action teaches students to arrive at new understandings, to think for themselves, and become independent knowers and doers. Literature offers contact zones as well as safe houses. The texts that we study in the classroom can be different from the ones learners might read on their own. They can co-exist – and overlap and by doing both learners broaden the great conversations about literature and life.
• Wolsey (2012) characterises the learning process in similar terms: a dichotomy between global moves and local operations. Local operations are about the detail – words, grammar, structure, literary devices, how to answer questions about texts. Global moves are about developing a much broader expertise about what texts mean and where they fit in terms of genre and world and human issues.  
• Beach and Friedrich say that excessive attention to usage and mechanics can be counterproductive to a student’s understanding of global moves. Excessive attention of this sort encourages a replication of ideas and a mimicking of the work of others. Examiners constantly point this out – the way students regurgitate a learned vocabulary and half-understood ideas, which they are clearly not comfortable with. Global learning tends to lead to high performance. Why does this text work as a whole? Why is it significant? Are we able to cross hatch interlocking overlapping often contradictory ideas within this text and between this texts and other texts?
• Bleiman puts what all this together looks like: …rather than imagining that the global comes automatically via the teaching of the local, I’d argue that if we understand the big picture – why we’re  looking at texts in the way that we are, then we’ll be able to fit the detail into that bigger schema or mental picture. Conceptual understanding comes first in order that the global and the local to work in tandem.
• If we have a choice of texts – which types of texts should we look for? Some thoughts:

• Texts that deal with big issues. They can open up emotional, intellectual, and cultural excitement. Discovering that books are capable of this is important.
• We should start by using texts that build on the language and experiences that learners bring to the classroom, not drive that language and those lives underground.  The ‘black lives matter’ movement makes this point unequivocally. Decontextualizing books doesn’t help. As both Eagleton and Applebee insist – learning, reading and criticism are all a multi-vocal evolving conversation. This shouldn’t mean that we are ‘tyrannised’ by what we think is relevant – invite in voices from beyond the classroom and the neighbourhood.
• As a result of this variety of voices, books can offer opportunities to cross hatch, interlocking, overlapping, and often contradictory, ideas. In the process, we should use texts which draw attention to themselves as texts and make readers work to unravel them  – not only what the text says, but how it says it. Aiming for a level of reading sophistication that builds confidence – and as Rosen comments, invites learners to hear the silences in stories.  
• Contrast those figures on the decline of English as a subject being studied, with the huge growth in the popularity of Young Adult fiction. It is almost certainly true that students do not see what teachers are obliged to teach them for exams and assessments and what they read and engage with away from school as the same thing at all. Ask any 15 year old what their favourite subject is, and English rarely gets a mention – and yet they love reading – and games, and graphic novels, mini-series, movies. Eagleton adds that computer games like novels, can be immersive; like literature, they beg questions and require interpretations. Both forms, as well as being very much part of the adolescent world, are in a conversation with that world. 

Holbrook and Polanyi had a similar thought – and it gives us a temporary conclusion to this conversation. If we are seriously concerned with the significance of what our students experience in our classrooms, then we cannot just stop at the language (the mechanics) of English. We, and they, must see what that language points to.

A selection of texts that support a reinvention of the English wheel

Redefining English for the more Able Ian Warwick and Ray Speakman. (2018)                                        

Literature and why it matters Robert Eaglestone.  (2019)                                                                                     

English: Shared Futures ed. Eaglestone and Marshall.  (2018)                                                                

Curriculum as Conversation Arthur N Applebee  (1996)                                                                                   

English for Meaning David Holbrook  (1979)                                                                                             

What Matters in English Teaching, collected blogs Barbara Bleiman (2019)                                                                                                        

Root and Blossom Peter Abbs (1976)                                                                                                               

Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire (1970)                                                                                                   

Writings on life, language and learning 1958 -2008 Harold Rosen, ed John Richmond (2017)