What Barbara Bleiman gets right about the decline of English teaching (and what she gets wrong)

In her article “English: how the subject lost its spark,” Barbara Bleiman, a consultant for the English and Media Centre, examines the decline in student engagement with English, attributing it to increasingly rigid teaching methods and an overemphasis on exam preparation.

Barbara contrasts two teaching approaches: one where students are provided with factual information about a poem before reading it, focusing on memorisation for testing purposes; and another where students first read and discuss the poem, fostering personal interpretation and critical thinking. She argues that the former is now prevalent in classrooms and is reducing English to a mechanical exercise, stripping away its creative and discursive essence.

She contends that this exam-centric culture has led to formulaic responses, diminishing students’ individual voices and enthusiasm for the subject. She calls for a return to teaching practices that prioritise exploration, personal engagement, and critical thinking, asserting that these elements are fundamental to the discipline of English and essential for rekindling students’ passion for the subject.

And she makes some good points. English is often taught in the way she describes and this does often feel soul numbing. She’s probably correct to suggest that overly generic interpretations of cognitive science have lethally mutated. And, although she doesn’t implicate it directly - there’s little doubt in my mind that the lack of specification in the English Language GCSE works to encourage schools to reduce the English curriculum to the contents of the test.

She closes her argument by suggesting that students don’t like English anymore because “the aspects that made it exciting and enjoyable, that give it a distinctive identity, disciplinary coherence, validity and rigour, have been eroded, sometimes even stripped away, leaving something that is no longer really literary study at all but rather the performance of a new kind of English that is very different and far less enjoyable.”

When I trained in the 1990s, the fashion was to teach children creativity and empathy. We’d read young adult novels and ask, ‘How do you think the characters feel? How would you feel in that situation?’ Then we’d ask students to write letters to the characters expressing these feelings, or compose a diary entry from different characters’ perspectives where they reveal their reactions to events. Other stuff – like sentence structure – we assumed children would just pick up if they read enough young adult novels and wrote enough diary entries.  

With the era of accountability, results became ever more important. English lessons were increasingly focussed on checking off attainment targets, and students spent ever more time drilling skills as the curriculum became an extended rehearsal for examinations. If it was considered at all, the idea that student should find meaning in their study of English was dismissed as risibly elitist.

More recently, we’ve become fascinated with cognitive science and begun to focus on building up students’ stores of knowledge about literature and grammar. So, students learn lists of contextual facts, engage in retrieval practice quizzes and answer multiple-choice questions. But in the rush to reinvent the subject as ‘knowledge-rich’ there’s a risk that self-expression, empathy and meaning may be thrown out along with the admittedly filthy bathwater.

You can see that our positions are closer than many – especially Barbara – might think. But here’s where we differ: I don’t remember a time as an English teacher when English had a spark. The subject has been in crisis for at least as long as I’ve been a teacher. And, in my view, this is because English teachers work in the dark. We run on vibes and the half remembered moments of joy we sometimes experienced as students.

Unlike most other school subjects English does not consist of an agreed, settled body of knowledge. We take our guidance from examination boards. We dwell on the detailed knowledge of a very few canonical texts and attempt to teach and assess a generic set of skills in the forlorn hope that this will equip young people for the vicissitudes they will face in life. But if this is not enough, if our students need more than this to navigate an uncertain world, we are often unprepared to guide them make meaning.   

I am no exception. My literature degree was gleefully focussed on literary theory, and tended to overlook the centrality of literature itself, except to diminish it. As a result, I embarked on my teaching career unaware of much of what the study of literature and language has to offer. In the fifteen years I spent as a full-time English teacher, never once was it suggested I might want or need to expand my subject knowledge. All the training I received – pre- and in-service – was at the level of the pedagogic ‘how,’ and most of that was concerned with teaching as a generic act, with the same advice offered to teachers of all subjects. What specialist training there was focussed on teaching to examination specifications. So how did it come to this? Clearly this all pre-dates the surge in popularity of cognitive science. And if exam boards are to blame, why they decide on the choices they’ve made?

At some point in the last half century, English underwent seismic changes in higher education. It became common to hear that all language, no matter how transient or insubstantial, could be considered literature; that all texts are of equal worth; that the reason some texts are considered more important than others is the result of unfair power structures. We shouldn’t seek to blame literary theorists; they were responding to the consensus that existed before them and sought to undermine overconfidence with some much-needed tentativity. Much of what they had to say has enlivened and enriched the subject, but the pendulum swung too far. Old certainties were replaced with new, equally dogmatic beliefs. This new fervour eroded English’s understanding of what it was. Now, wherever we look there is self-conscious hand-wringing. Is the author dead? Is the act of reading opaque and contentious? How do the concerns of identity, gender, ethnicity and class affect the processes of reading and writing? Is there such thing as universal human nature? Is the aesthetic appeal of literature always subordinate to notions of power and prejudice? And what even is literature?  

This left English teachers not just lacking expertise, but lacking conviction. Until recently, discussions about what to teach were replaced with injunctions on how to teach. The curriculum became the business of exam boards and quangos; English teachers were shut out of the debate. Now, with a renewed focus on the curriculum, we are often unsure where to start or how to proceed. If we have b¹een trying to build on a foundation of uncertainty we shouldn’t be surprised if the resulting structure is rickety.   

Knowing things about language and literature is an essential part of the discipline, and. If students are going to enjoy the subject and do well in it, they need to be more knowledgeable. But lacking expertise, passionate intensity has resulted in all too predictable mistakes being loosed upon the world. English is in danger of becoming a clockwork version of itself with children learning lists of quotations and tables of techniques but with little sense of how to use these facts to create meaning.  

‘Knowledge-rich’ should – can – be much more than an antidote to ‘knowledge-lite’. We need a third way, a path between the poorly conceived excesses of the ‘skills-based’ curriculum and the technocratic grip of the knowledge organiser; a path which teaches, “knowledge of a tradition that involves both knowing and doing,” and conceives of the English curriculum as a conversation.

The British-Hungarian polymath, Michael Polanyi warned, “Man lives in the meanings he is able to discern. He extends himself into that which he finds coherent and is at home there.”² If we do not enlarge and extend the meanings our students are able to discern there will be no obvious tragedy. Our students will, on the whole, be at home with the limited glimpses of literature and language permitted them, but they will be prevented from entering and feeling comfortable in a larger, richer tradition of ideas and meaning.

My book, Making Meaning in English is a plea is to care about something only those who already know how to make meaning in English are able to discern. Its aim is to reimagine English as a subject concerned primarily with significance.  It explores what I see as the need to reconceive of English as a space where old and new ideas clash, where the canon is wrestled with, and where students are given the intellectual wherewithal to impose their own judgments and meanings on what we lay before them. 

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once said, “As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors … of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries.”³ If our students are to claim this inheritance, they need us to have higher expectations of ourselves. They need our guidance, our encouragement and our determination to share that which we have been fortunate enough to be granted access.  What they absolutely do not need is for us to fool ourselves into thinking it was better back in some mythical version of the past and then to recreate mistakes we should commit to never making again.

1. Arthur Applebee, Curriculum as Conversation, p. 30

2. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning, p. 66

3. Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, p. 490