Sunday Schools and English Teaching: Re-reading Ian Hunter and the Emergence of ‘English’ in the United States

Abstract

This article represents an ‘overdue encounter’ with the ideas of Ian Hunter to reconsider the historical emergence and descent of English teaching in the United States. Influenced by Hunter’s account of the ‘pastoral’ and ‘bureaucratic’ genealogy of English teaching in England, my historical study documented continuities and discontinuities between the pedagogical archives of the nineteenth-century American Sunday school and turn of the twentieth-century English education. This analysis highlights the pastoral, scientific and bureaucratic lineage of ‘modern’ literary education in the United States and the ways that English, since its emergence, has been implicated in practices of pastoral power, discipline, biopower and governmentality. My aim is to draw attention to Hunter’s provocative ideas, lay groundwork for more comparative histories of English teaching across Anglophone countries and stimulate discussions concerning English’s cultural importance and value, dangers and normalising tendencies, and location in historically (dis)continuous networks of power and knowledge.

Keywords:

• Secondary English
• Sunday schools
• curriculum history
• pastoral power

Notes

1. In the interest of space, this section offers a simplified reading of the first half of Culture and Government (Hunter 1988), which frames a more complicated account of the birth of literary pedagogy. Given my focus on pedagogy in this article, I have not engaged the second half of Hunter (1988), which describes the formation of modern literary criticism. For relatively brief yet comparatively comprehensive summaries of Hunter’s work, please see Goddard (2009) or Hunter (1987, 1996a).

2. I offer a more extensive history of English teaching and ‘the cure of souls’ in Brass (2011).

3. By 1860, most US Sunday schools had transitioned from independent, non-sectarian institutions to denominational institutions connected to particular churches; thus, by 1880, Brown (2004) argues, the traditional contours of evangelical print culture were unrecognisable; tract societies, Bible societies and Protestant missions had largely become sectarian and focused on foreign missions, not domestic welfare. For a comparison, courses in ‘English’ were rare and poorly defined in US secondary schools before the 1870s but experienced exponential growth and attention between the 1870s and early twentieth century (Hays 1936).

4. See Brass (2010) for a more elaborated treatment of Chubb’s (1902) literary pedagogy and its self-disciplinary effects.

5. For more on the place of ‘science’ in Chubb (1902) and in early twentieth-century English teaching more generally, please see an earlier article in this journal (Brass 2009).

6. In particular, I would flesh out and complicate my representations of Hall as ‘psychologist’ by exploring not only the scientific, but religious, mystical and racial underpinnings of ‘adolescence’ and Hall’s work more generally, note reverberations of Romanticism, Plato and Classical education throughout the work of Corson (1895) and Chubb (1902), and also make more of the complicated synthesis and scaffolding of ideas and practices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American education. As Popkewitz (1997) has noted, these changing patterns of governing were the product of multiple trajectories – not just moral tenets associated with Protestantism and the social welfare state, but ‘industrialization, urbanization, immigration, new political organizations … and utilitarian and pragmatic themes – all were part of the transformations inscribed in schooling’ (141).