English teaching and the educationalisation of social problems in the United States, 1894–1918

Abstract

This study draws from histories of “educationalisation” and neo-Foucaultian histories of English teaching in an archival analysis that revisits landmark pedagogical texts that coincided with the rapid expansion of the school subject English in between the 1894 Report of the Committee of Ten and 1918 Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. The archival analysis considers these two reform documents along with the first comprehensive books on English teaching, which were published between the 1890s and 1920s. The study’s analysis adopts a selective focus on their explicit aims and rationales for teaching English, particularly in secondary schools, and the pedagogic logics and practices by which English was imagined as a governmental response to various social problems. This archival work recovers the largely overlooked ways in which the teaching of English was positioned to improve the moral and social condition of the population, to develop youths’ capacities for self-governance, to professionalise teaching through the psychological sciences, and to include “problem” populations within the corrective spaces of the English classroom. It also illustrates how distinctive approaches to teaching English language and literature were understood to attune youths’ “souls” to a range of governmental norms. This study bridges ideas from two historical literatures in order to unearth “educationalisation” problematics and “governmental” practices that traditional histories of English teaching have largely obscured, particularly in the United States.

Keywords:

• Educationalisation
• English teaching
• governmentality
• curriculum history

Notes

¹ Robin Peel, Annette Patterson, and Jeanne Gerlach, eds., Questions of English: Ethics, Aesthetics, Rhetoric, and the Formation of the Subject in England, Australia, and the United States (London: Routledge Falmer, 2000).

² E. Hays, College Entrance Requirements in English: Their Effects on the High Schools. An American Survey (New York: Teachers College Press, 1936).

³ Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe, eds., Educational Research: The Educationalization of Social Problems (New York: Springer, 2008).

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Thomas Popkewitz, “The Social, Psychological and Educational Sciences: From Educationalization to Pedagogicalization of The Family and Child,” in ibid.

⁶ Daniel Trohler, Thomas Popkewitz, and David Labaree, eds., Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2011).

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Smeyers and Depaepe, Educational Research.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Lynda Stone, “Educationalization in a USA Present: A Historicist Rendering," in Educational Research ed. Smeyers and Depaepe, 61–78; David Labaree, “The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the United States,” Educational Theory 58, no. 4 (2008): 447–60.

¹¹ Robert Morgan, “The ‘Englishness’ of English Teaching,” in Bringing English to Order: The History and Politics of a School Subject, ed. Ivor Goodson and Peter Medway (East Sussex Falmer Press, 1990), 197–241.

¹² Annette Patterson, Phil Cormack and Bill Green, “The Child, the Text and the Teacher: Reading Primers and Reading Instruction,” Paedogogica Historica 48, no. 2 (2012), 185–96; Green, Cormack and Patterson, “Re-reading the Reading Lesson: Episodes in the History of Reading Pedagogy,” Oxford Review of Education 39, no. 3 (2013), 329–44; Green and Cormack, “Curriculum History, “English” and the New Education; or, Installing the Empire of English?,” Pedagogy, Culture, & Society 16, no. 3 (2008), 253–67; Green and Cormack, “Literacy, Nation, Schooling: Reading (in) Australia,” in Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Daniel Trohler, Thomas Popkewitz and David Labaree (New York: Routledge, 2011), 241–61; Cormack, “Imagining the National Subject: English and the Post-Primary School Child in Early Twentieth-Century South Australia,” in English Teachers at Work: Narratives, Counter Narratives, and Arguments, ed. Brenton Doecke, David Homer and Helen Nixon (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press/Australian Association for the Teaching of English, 2003), 109–22; Bill Green and Catherine Beavis, eds., Teaching the English Subjects: Essays on Curriculum History and Australian Schooling (Deakin: Deakin University Press, 1996).

¹³ Peter Medway and Ivor Goodson, eds., Bringing English to Order: The History and Politics of a School Subject (London: Taylor & Francis, 1990); James Donald, Sentimental Education: Schooling, Popular Culture, and the Regulation of Liberty (London: Verso, 1992); Robert Morgan, “Three Unspeakable Things: Looking Through English’s Family Album,” Journal of Educational Thought 29, no. 1 (1995), 3–33; Morgan, “The ‘Englishness’ of English Teaching”.

¹⁴ Morgan, “The 'Englishness' of English Teaching”.

¹⁵ Brass, “The Sweet Tyranny of Creating One's Own Life: Rethinking Power and Freedom in English Teaching,” Educational Theory 60, no. 6 (2011): 703–17; Brass, “Historicizing English Pedagogy: The Extension and Transformation of ‘The Cure of Souls’,” Pedagogy, Culture and Society 19, no.1 (2011): 93–112; Brass, “Sunday Schools and English Teaching: Re-reading Ian Hunter and “The Emergence of ‘English’ in the United States.” Changing English 18, no. 4 (2011): 337–49.

¹⁶ Green, Cormack and Reid, “Putting Our Past to Work...” English in Australia 127–28 (2000) 111–19.

¹⁷ Arthur Applebee, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1974).

¹⁸ National Education Association, “Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies” (place of publication unknown, 1894), 58.

¹⁹ Erika Lindemann, ed., Reading the Past, Writing the Future: A Century of American Literacy Education and the National Council of Teachers of English (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2010).

²⁰ Thomas Popkewitz, Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child (New York: Routledge, 2008).

²¹ Percival Chubb, The Teaching of English in the Elementary School and the Secondary School (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 236--7.

²² See also Donald, Sentimental Education.

²³ Ibid, p. 53.

²⁴ Ibid, p. 62.

²⁵ Page 2; emphasis in the original.

²⁶ Page 32.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Daniel Trohler, “The Educationalization of the Modern World: Progress, Passion, and the Protestant Promise of Education,” In Educational Research, ed. Smeyers and Depaepe, 44.

²⁹ My approach here was initially influenced by Ian Hunter, Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988) and has been developed more extensively elsewhere ((Brass “Sunday Schools”; Brass “Historicizing English Pedagogy”)). However, Hunter’s arguments go much further than my own, particularly his work to locate literary criticism itself as a mode of government. My goal here is more limited: I am tracing a pivotal moment of English teaching in the US that was explicitly tied to reaching young people’s “souls”. I see the historical continuities and changes explored in these texts as illustrative of what Hunter called “late mutations” in Christian pastoral care that seem central to Trohler’s questions regarding the education of the soul.

³⁰ See Brass “Sunday Schools”; Brass “Historicizing English Pedagogy”; Jory Brass “Constituting a Sense of ‘American’ Identity and Place through Language and Literary Study: A Curriculum History, 1898-1912,” English Teaching: Practice and Critique 12, no. 2 (2013): 41–57.

³¹ For an extensive treatment of the “literature lesson” in the Anglo-Australian context, see Hunter, “Learning the Literature Lesson”, in Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy: Papers of the XII World Congress on Reading, ed. Luke (London: John Benjamins, 1990), 49–82; see also Patterson’s accounts of the “sympathetic” teacher, including “‘Personal Response’ and English Teaching”, in Child and Citizen: Genealogies of Schooling and Subjectivity, ed. Denise Meredtyh and Deborah Tyler (Nathan, QLD: Griffith University, Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, 1993), 61–85. See also broader histories of reading lessons and subject English, such as Patterson, Cormack and Green, “The Child, the Text and the Teacher.”

³² Given more space, I would pursue these power relations through a governmentality perspective that could complicate negative readings of pedagogisation as emotional manipulation, a matter of professional status gains, and oppositional to autonomy, liberation and independence (cf. Smeyers and Depaepe, Educational Research, pp. 15–16).

³³ Peter Medway and Ivor Goodson, eds., Bringing English to Order: The History and Politics of a School Subject (London: Taylor & Francis, 1990); John Dixon, A Schooling in “English”: Critical Episodes in the Struggle to Shape Literary and Cultural Studies. (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991); Peel, Patterson, and Gerlach, Questions of English.

³⁴ Hunter Culture and Government – if not much older disciplines of spiritual formation, see also Brass “Sunday Schools”; Brass “Historicizing English Pedagogy”; David. Hamilton, Learning about Education: An Unfinished Curriculum (London: Open University Press, 1990); John T. McNeil, A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper, 1977); Patterson, Cormack, and Green, "The Child, the Text and the Teacher.”

³⁵ Hunter Culture and Government; Peel, Patterson and Gerlach, Questions of English; Robert Morgan, “Provocations for a Media Education in Small Letters,” in Teaching Popular Culture: Beyond Radical Pedagogy, ed. David Buckingham (London: UCL Press, 1998), 107–31; Brass “Historicizing English Pedagogy”.

³⁶ For a broader discussion on the place of the human psychological sciences in this governmentality, please see Popkewitz “The Social, Psychological and Educational Sciences” and a range of his earlier work on the “alchemy of school subjects” and “governing the soul”.

³⁷ Hunter, Culture and Government, had previously identified the convergence of these pastoral and bureaucratic aims as central to the establishment of English in the Anglo-Australian context.

³⁸ Brass, “Constituting a Sense of ‘American’ Identity and Place though Language and Literary Study” English Teaching Practice and Critique 12, no. 2, (2013): 41–57. Brass, “Re-reading the Emergence of the Subject English: Disrupting NCTE’s Historiography,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 29, no. 1 (2013): 102–16.

³⁹ Ian Hunter, “After English: Toward a Less Critical Literacy,” on Constructing Critical Literacies, ed. Sandy Muspratt, Allan Luke and Peter Freebody (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1997), 315–34, here p. 321.

⁴⁰ See Popkewitz’s “The Social, Psychological and Educational Sciences”, as well as his earlier accounts of the “alchemy of school subjects” and the psychology of “governing the soul”, which draw from the work of Nikolas Rose.