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Abstract
Drawing on observational evidence of two classes working on Romeo and Juliet, one in England and the other in Palestine, this essay explores the nature of knowledge in relation to English as a school subject. It asserts the importance of paying attention to the resources that students, situated in culture and history, bring with them to the reading of a text. It seeks to contest a set of assumptions about ‘powerful’ knowledge as universal and transcendent, insisting that classrooms are places where meanings are made, not merely transmitted.
Notes
1. Young and Lambert distinguish their version of a knowledge‐led curriculum from the current English national curriculum and form that which is proposed by E.D. Hirsch (Citation1987, Citation1996, Citation2006) on the grounds that Hirsch's model of ‘core knowledge’ is solely concerned with content, whereas their model also privileges concepts and activities (Young and Lambert Citation2014: 68). We focus here on Young and Lambert's version because it is, in our view, the most coherent and most cogently argued version of a knowledge‐led curriculum. We disagree with it, but we think it is worth taking seriously.
2. We are very grateful to Amy Climpson for her permission to write about this lesson and for supplying us with information about Andrew's subsequent responses, in speech and in writing, to Capulet's treatment of Juliet.
3. The names of all school students have been changed to culturally appropriate pseudonyms.
4. Arnold argued that ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ had the capacity to act as an intellectually liberating resource, the means by which we might turn ‘a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically’ (Arnold Citation1869/1993: 190). Though we might want to quarrel with Arnold's location of transformational power within the text itself (rather than in the readers’ dialogue with the text and with each other), and with his simple binary opposition of the ‘fresh’ and the ‘stock’, we recognise that he was, at least, envisaging some sort of transactional process in which the text becomes a tool for (re‐)thinking current problems. No such appreciation of the complex and contingent interactions between texts and readers would appear to inform the national curriculum into which Arnold's words have been coopted.