History Lessons for English

Abstract

John Dixon is a deservedly prominent teacher of English teachers. His Growth Through English was perhaps the single most important manifesto-cum-manual for what has been known since the sixties as the 'personal growth' model of English. Still, it is one thing to practise a discipline and quite another to subject it to scholarly investigation. Apologists are rarely good historians or sociologists of their own disciplines. They are usually too convinced of the disciplines's moral necessity -and too busy telling the story of its (pending) moral triumph - to allow the facts to assume less comforting patterns. John Dixon's A Schooling in 'English': Critical Episodes in the Struggle to Shape Literary and Cultural Studies is no exception to this rule. Foucault and his collaborators have described the tasks of a 'history of the present' in terms of the need to make things that are familiar to us strange, and to make things that 'go without saying' much harder to say. Although chronologically speaking Dixon's book is a history of the present, its aims are the reverse of these. This book takes what is arguably a very unexpected cultural transformation -the redeployment of a formerly esoteric regimen of aesthetic cultivation as a disciplinary practice in mass education systems - and makes it seem inevitable. By the time Dixon is finished, English and cultural studies are so deeply identified with the moral universals of humanism - personal experience, enjoyment, democracy, popular resist­ance, community, life - that their history is robbed of all contingency and, indeed, all historicity. The only question that we are left with is why it took so long for their triumph to occur, or what last obstacles must be finally overcome.