Historicising English pedagogy: the extension and transformation of ‘the cure of souls’

Abstract

This paper historicises familiar assertions that English is qualitatively different from other school subjects to highlight historical commitments and sociopolitical effects of English teaching that are often obscured in contemporary pedagogical writing. It juxtaposes three different pedagogical literatures across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries to illustrate how English teaching has been – and largely remains – linked in important ways with pastoral Christianity, the social sciences, and a range of governmental objectives of ‘modern’, welfare states. The paper denaturalises contemporary pedagogical distinctions and practices by highlighting how they largely reiterate pastoral logics and disciplines of nineteenth‐century Sunday school pedagogy. In addition, it examines historical continuities and discontinuities that sensitise us to the (un)changing ways in which English pedagogy has been implicated in practices of social regulation, productive power, and larger struggles over telling the ‘truth’ about one’s self, others, and the world.

Keywords:

• English teaching
• curriculum history
• literature
• cure of souls

Notes

1. This paper has emphasised the pastoral‐Christian and social‐administrative reverberations in English’s pedagogical literature. This is not to suggest that elementary and secondary English teaching were not influenced by the humanities. Rather, since most people take for granted that the school subject English has been derived from the humanities (Luke 2004), I have opted here to draw attention to English education’s less recognised links with pastoral Christianity, social science, and the social administration of populations (see also Hunter 1988).

2. For unknown reasons, Eaton and Mains printed Fitch’s book with a publication date that read ‘184‐?’. To avoid this distracting in‐text citation, I have cited this book as Fitch (1840) in accordance with reference guides; however, the book may have been published at another point in the 1840s.

3. For more on the European Sunday school movement, see Lacquer (1976), whose history challenged the established view that the emergence of the European Sunday school movement was closely tied to the Industrial Revolution and the social control of the working classes.

4. For more on the place of literacy in nineteenth‐century Sunday schools and common schools, please see Soltow and Stevens’ (1981) socioeconomic analysis of nineteenth‐century literacy campaigns, Kennedy’s (1966) history of Protestant education, Nord’s (2004) history of Christian publishing, and Brown’s (2004) history of ‘evangelical print culture’. For more on the complex interweaving of American exceptionalism and Christian eschatology in nineteenth‐century reform movements, see also Popkewitz (1998), especially his use of Bercovitch’s (1978) ‘American Jeremiad’.

5. I do not want to suggest that Chubb’s (1902) pedagogical writing was solely located at the discursive intersections of pastoral Christianity, science, and social administration – or to suggest that Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ accounts for all of the social relations at play here. For example, Chubb also linked this literary regimen to the work of Plato, European pedagogues like Pestalozzi, and nineteenth‐century Romanticism.