Electronic Reserve Text:

Alan Sinfield

"Give an account of Shakespeare and Education, showing why you think they are effective and what you have appreciated about them. Support your comments with precise references"

From: Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester University Press, 1985.

Any social order has to include the conditions for its own continuance, and capitalism and patriarchy do this partly through the education system. The positions in the productive process which people are to occupy are an effect of the relations of production, but the preparing of people to occupy those positions is accomplished by the family, the media and education, and the State finances schools, requires attendance at them, trains and employs teachers. This preparation is only in small part a matter of specific training and qualifications: in the main, it is achieved through the whole regime of the school, from classroom practices to the hierarchy of decision making, and through the mapping of knowledges by the curriculum and examinations.(1) Above all, education sustains 'the extended division between mental and manual labour that characterises the capitalist mode of production in general';(2) and, within that and overlapping unevenly with it, education sustains the subordination of women and ethnic minorities.

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approaches, with varying relations between these approaches and government. As we will see, the debate has been vitiated by a reluctance to inspect. economic and political determinants, and in c9nsequence progressive approaches have often amounted to little more than a subtle mode of securing assent to the relations of production. Nevertheless, this element of play in the system indicates the scope for radical intervention: 'The many contradictions which confront teachers and pupils can also provide the "space" for practical action for change'.(3) In education Shakespeare has been made to speak mainly for the right; that is the tendency which this book seeks to alter. His construction in English culture generally as the great National Poet whose plays embody universal truths has led to his being used to underwrite established practices in literary criticism and, consequently, in examinations. For literary criticism, Shakespeare is the keystone which guarantees the ultimate stability and rightness of the category 'Literature'. The status of other authors may be disputed; indeed, one of the ways criticism offers itself as serious and discriminating is by engaging in such disputes, policing its boundaries. But
Shakespeare is always there as the final instance of the validity of Literature. Then, because it is such a profound and universal experience, Literature must be taught to school pupils, whereupon it becomes an instrument within the whole apparatus of filtering whereby schools adjust young people to an unjust social order. And when in 1983 the Secretary of State required the nine GCE boards to devise a common core for A level the English working party could agree only one thing that is not vague and general: that at least one play by Shakespeare must be studied.(4) (See note 10 for an explanation of the British examination system.)
..
'All pupils, including those of very limited attainments, need the civilizing experience of contact with great literature, and can respond to its universality', declared the Newsom Report of 1963, but it added anxiously: 'They will depend heavily on the skill of the teacher as an interpreter'.(5) In practice it is found that not all pupils 'respond': as empirical studies have demonstrated repeatedly, educational 'attainment' in England is vitally influenced by class and gender.(6) Literature becomes a mark of differential 'attainment', preparing pupils for the differential opportunities and rewards in society at large. 'But then again, I read Shakespeare, and they all thought I was pretty mad for reading it. You see, I was interested in things, really, that I shouldn't have been interested in thinking back, what they said was, well look, we've told you what you can be, you've got this marvellous opportunity. You can be a shorthand

typist, or you" can be a nursery nurse'.(7) A crucial ideological manoeuvre in education is this: that the allegedly universal culture to which equal access is apparently offered is, at the same time, a marker of 'attainment' and hence of privilege. Thus those who are discriminated against on the grounds of gender, class and ethnic origins come to believe that it is their own fault (it serves them right).(8) So pupils are persuaded to accept appropriate attitudes to Literature as a criterion of general capacity. The Bullock Report of 1975 complacently observes: 'In a very real sense a pupil is himself being judged each time he responds in class to a piece of literature ...is the value-judgement he forms the one the teacher finds acceptable? Is he betraying himself, he may well ask, as one who lacks discrimination?'(9) He may well; but discrimination is certainly what she or he is getting. The Report thinks the answer is for the teacher to handle the occasion with sensitivity: it does not observe that the pupil is being persuaded to internalize success or failure with particular and relative cultural codes as an absolute judgement on her or his potential as a human being.

The system works most plainly through examinations. For a start, as many as twenty-five per cent of pupils take no public examination, not even English Language (they are 'no good' at English, not good English). Then, Literature is the ground of a further discrimination. At C5E and O level the candidate can study English in terms of basic reading and writing skills and must make a positive choice to study Literature. One CSE board warns teachers: 'Candidates, particularly the less able, should be steered away from "The Works of William Shakespeare" (all of them!)'.(10) About fourteen per cent of the pupils taking O level English Language 'go on' to take A level English, but this is not just a growth in competence: this examination consists mainly of literary appreciation (with one of the three papers devoted to Shakespeare's plays). To advance is to move into Literature.(11)

Whilst Literature is made to operate as a mode of exclusion in respect of class, it disadvantages girls by including them (this seems a paradox, but it only shows Literature's flexibility as a cultural form). Of those taking A level English with the London board in 1982 three-quarters were girls (the figures were precisely the reverse
for Physics); between a fifth and a quarter of all girls taking A level took English. We see here both an internalisation of dominant notions of the kinds of things girls should do, and also the outcome of all kinds of subtle pressures within schools. (12) The consequences are twofold. First, most of the texts studied reinforce the gender stereotyping which leads girls to these texts -'women are portrayed'

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as being passive and ineffectual, and taking action only for personal or destructive reasons' (Sharpe, Just Like a Girl, p. 150); Irene Payne recalls: 'One teacher gave us the following lines from King Lear to write out because we had been noisy: "Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low -an excellent thing in woman" '.(13) Second, girls are condemned to a relatively low position in the job market. Official reports assume that women will be essentially housewives or unskilled,(14) though in fact in 1975 they were 41 per cent of the labour force, and their failure to take technical subjects keeps them in relatively unskilled work and reduces their chances of further and higher education.
Of course, it should not be assumed that the process of ideological reproduction in schools is invariably successful. A survey of 1000 pupils taking O and A level English Literature in selective schools in 1968 found that although most of them expressed a commitment to Literature, their actual private reading was 'light'. 'It is as though many of these pupils have two sets of cultural values -one for school and the outside investigator, another for home and their leisure reading.'(15) Of the 800 O level pupils only one in eight showed any wish to go on reading poetry or plays after leaving school. This is little cause for satisfaction: it is likely that most of the disaffected had found that they were not 'good' at literature; and look at the waste of time, effort and money. However, it serves to indicate that hegemony is not easily, or in any straightforward way, achieved. Although the dominant class or class fraction controls the terms and conditions within which cultural production is carried on, 'Groups or classes which do not stand at the apex of power, nevertheless find ways of expressing and realising in their culture their subordinate position and experiences'.(16) I will show how the institutional construction of Shakespeare in education has had to struggle with subordinate cultures and with rival movements within the dominant.

Above all, Shakespeare does not have to work in a conservative manner. His plays do not have to signify in the ways they have customarily been made to (it will be the project of the next section to analyse how GCE constructs them in certain ways). It is partly a matter of reading them differently--drawing attention to their historical insertion, their political implications, and the activity of criticism in reproducing them. Such readings are exemplified in the first part of this book. And it is also a matter of changing the way Shakespeare signifies in society: he does not have to be a crucial stage in the justification of elitism in education and culture. He has been appropriated for certain practices and attitudes, and can be reappropriated for others.

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An analysis of the reading of a sample of children aged 10, 12 and 14 in maintained and direct-grant schools produced 7557 book titles of which 54 were 'adult quality narrative', but Shakespeare figures not at all.(17) The reading of Shakespeare begins with and overwhelmingly takes its character from the examination questions set at O and A level (see note 10). These are controlled entirely by certain universities; teachers, whether they like it or not, must in fairness prepare their pupils for them. A whole apparatus of school editions and cramming aids has sprung up around them. I will point out in the question papers the two fundamental mystifications of bourgeois ideology. All the questions specified were set in 1983.

The main move is the projection of local conditions on to the eternal. As Rachel Sharp puts it, 'The power relations which are peculiar to market society are seen as how things have always been and ought to be. They acquire a timelessness which is powerfully legitimised by a theory of human nature. ...Political struggles to alter present-day social arrangements are seen as futile for "things are as they are" because of man's basic attributes and nothing could ever be very different.(18) This move is built in to the structure of the whole exercise, through the notion that Shakespeare is the great National Poet who speaks universal truths and whose plays are the ultimate instance of Literature. It is made also through the ways the questions invite the candidates to handle the plays. Almost invariably it is assumed that the plays reveal universal 'human' values and qualities and that they are self-contained and coherent entities; and the activity of criticism in producing these assumptions is effaced.

The appeal to absolute values and qualities is ubiquitous: 'At the centre of King Lear lies the question, "What is a man?" Discuss' (Oxford and Cambridge, A level); 'Beginning with a consideration of the following passage, discuss Shakespeare's presentation of Goodness in Macbeth' (Welsh, A level). Women, of course, are a special category within the universal (there are fewer questions about female than male characters): "The Winter's Tale is much more concerned with the qualities of womanhood, its virtue, its insight, and its endurance. Discuss' (Southern, A level). If women seem not to be
manifesting the expected qualities then that is a matter for comment: "'The men in Twelfth Night are ridiculous in what they say and do: it is the women who are full of common sense". Show how far you agree. ..' (Welsh, O level). The alleged coherence and self-containedness of the text re-enacts at the level of the particular reading the coherence and self-containedness claimed by ideology. In the examination questions almost

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no reference is made to the diverse forms which the play has taken-- and may take --to scholarly discussions about provenance, to the conditions under which it has been transmitted, to the different forms it takes today, from school editions to stage, film and TV productions. (19) Even the occasional question about staging is liable to involve the assumption that there is a true reading behind the diverse possibilities: 'How, as a young actor, would you try to cope with the difficulties of playing the part of John of Gaunt' (Southern, O level- bad luck if you're an actress). The text is there; the most common form of question at O level begins 'Give an account of ...' and 'precise reference' is repeatedly demanded. That the text is to be regarded as coherent, either in terms of action or of dramatic effect, is frequently insisted upon. "'While we may hope for a happy ending to King Lear, Shakespeare's conclusion is entirely fitting. Discuss." (Associated, O level); 'Write about the dramatic effectiveness of the last act of Twelfth Night, and show how the ending is connected to earlier episodes of the play' (London, O level). Everything comes out the way it always had to, every incident is justified by its 'effectiveness' (one of the commonest terms on the papers).

The effacing of the activity of criticism works mainly through the assumption that the candidate will discover the true response or meaning in the manner established by literary criticism as appropriate to the text. Not only are these assumptions not exposed for inspection, they are drawn forth naturally, as it appears, from the interaction between the candidate and the text. The fact that between those two comes the learnt procedures of literary criticism is obscured. Of course, the questions often invite discussion, agreement or disagreement, but normally that is within a prescribed range of possibilities and to infringe these requires a repudiation of the authority of Shakespeare or the examiners, often both. A whole range of issues and positions is simply not allowed to reach visibility. 'Compare Shakespeare's treatment of the problem of evil in any two plays' (Oxford and Cambridge, A level): the candidate who sees that 'the problem of evil' is a mystified concept must force a space for such an analysis, knowing that she or he is out of accord with the examiners and will have little time to show the expected 'knowledge' of the plays. Questions which appear to invite a personal response are often all the more tyrannical: 'Give an account of the scene in Capulet's orchard where Romeo sees Juliet on the balcony, showing what you have enjoyed about the words spoken by the lovers' (Welsh, O level). Candidates are invited to interrogate their experience to discover a response which has in actuality been learnt. As Perry Anderson showed, this Leavisite strategy demands (whilst

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lamenting the absence of) one crucial precondition: a shared, stable system of beliefs and values';(20) what actually happens is that candidates are required to take up a certain system of values --those we have been identifying--in order satisfactorily to answer the question.

The second fundamental mystification of bourgeois ideology is the construction of individual subjectivity as a given which is undetermined and unconstituted and hence a ground of meaning and coherence: 'In effect the individual is understood in terms of a pre-social essence, nature, or identity and on that basis s/he is invested with a quasi-spiritual autonomy. The individual becomes the origin and focus of meaning -an individuated essence which precedes and --in idealist philosophy --transcends history and society .'(21) Eternal values can no longer be ratified securely by religion, but now they are grounded in their perception through authentic subjectivity. This relationship is figured precisely in the question: 'There are moments in King Lear when the insights of individual characters seem to provide a key to the play's deepest themes and preoccupations. Consider this claim in relation to one of the following "insights" ..' (Oxford and Cambridge, A level). The individual and the universal are constituted in a mutually supportive polarity.

The examination papers construct Shakespeare and the candidate in terms of individuated subjectivity through their stress upon Shakespeare's free-standing genius, their emphasis on characterisation, and their demand for the candidate's personal response. At no point do the GCE papers of 1983 invite candidates to consider the ways in which a play relates to its social context in Shakespeare's time or subsequently (the whole project of the present book). It seems to have been born, immaculately, into the classroom. Indeed, some questions actively encourage a notion of creation ex nihilo: 'By careful reference to appropriate scenes show how Shakespeare has created a dream-like world' OMB, O level).

The call for commentary on individual characters is the staple fare, especially at O level. 'Do you think Falstaff is ever sincere in Henry IV Part I?'; 'What sort of person is Henry IV? Do you think he always acts wisely?' -these are two of the three Associated O level questions on the play. Individuals are the unproblematic source of action and meaning, despite intermittent assertions, from diverse critical points of view, that this is not an appropriate framework for Elizabethan and Jacobean drama (consider .E. E. Stoll, L.C. Knights, Muriel Bradbrook, Catherine Belsey). Even questions which seem to bear upon the issue nudge the candidate into assuming a realist convention: "'In All's Well that Ends Well Shakespeare is concerned to make Helena good rather than plausible". Discuss the role and

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character of Helena in the play to show to what extent you agree with this statement' (Northern Ireland, A level); notice how Shakespeare's autonomous decision seems to be the only determinant.

Subjectivity and authenticity are the programme also in the customary appeal to the candidate's judgement and, often, personal response. We have seen that the candidate is supposed to discover in herself or himself the necessary procedures and judgements of literary criticism; at the same time, contradictorily, a personal response is required. This demand for individual assessment is often more coercive than the 'neutral' question. The determination of the Cambridge board to get the candidate to reveal the required response is apparent in this novel kind of question: 'This short scene is really doing three things: advancing the "story", adding to our knowledge of the characters, and expanding some of the ideas (about relationships and about the condition of the world) that are going to be important in the playas a whole. Show how much of this a close reading of the scene helps you to discover' (Cambridge, O levels). Peter Widdowson, looking at GCE questions on Hardy, found the same ideological construction: Hardy 'is reproduced within very limited parameters of intelligibility: "Hardy" as the tragic novelist of character struggling heroically with Nature, Fate, or other, pre-eminently non-social forces'.(22) Widdowson observed the total effacement of the fact that the critic, as much as the historian, is 'a "social phenomenon" who selects and organizes the facts/texts' according to his/her positioning in history ...who, in effect, "writes" Literature from the perspective of a historical and ideological present' (p. 4). It is this ideological construction that the present book is striving to overturn.

The twin manoeuvres of bourgeois ideology construct two dichotomies: universal versus historical and individual versus social. In each case the first term is privileged, and so meaning is sucked into the universal/individual polarity, draining it away from the historical and the social- which is where meaning is made by people together in determinate conditions, and where it might be contested. 'How far do you think that the fates of Antony and Cleopatra are inevitable rather than voluntary?' (Oxford and Cambridge, A level): that which is not universal is individual; any other level of explanation disappears down the yawning gulf between the two. The universal is unchangeable and the individual lives, quintessentially, in 'his' inner subjectivity; shared purpose to change the world is not just disqualified, it is not allowed into visibility. One question in 1983 promoted such an issue: "'In the realm of politics Shakespeare sees any hope for progress in human society as profoundly futile".

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Discuss with reference to two plays' (Cambridge, A level). Of course, agreement with the proposition is expected -'profoundly' and 'the realm' (suggesting a narrow range of operation for politics) work to secure this. The 'discussion' is hardly open.

We may envisage, then, the intellectual cast of the successfully socialised GCE candidate. She or he will be respectful of Shakespeare and high culture and accustomed to being appreciative of the cultural production which is offered through established institutions. '~he or he will be trained at giving opinions -within certain prescribed limits; at collecting evidence -though without questioning its status or the construction of the problem; at saying what is going on --though not whether that is what ought to happen; at seeing effectiveness, coherence, purposes fulfilled -but not conflict. And because the purposeful individual is perceived as the autonomous origin and ground of meaning and event, success in these exercises will be accepted as just reason for certain economic and social privileges.

It all seems perfectly adapted for the fastest-growing class fraction, the new petty bourgeoisie working in finance, advertising, the civil service, teaching, the health service, the social services and clerical occupations. The new petty bourgeoisie (unlike the old, of artisans and small shopkeepers) is constituted not by family but through education: 'The various petty bourgeois agents each possess, in relation to those subordinate to them, a fragment of the fantastic secret of knowledge that legitimises the delegated authority that they exercise. Hence the belief in the 'neutrality of culture', and in the educational apparatus as a corridor of circulation by the promotion and accession of the "best" to the bourgeois state, or in any case to a higher state in the specific hierarchy of mental labour."(23) The combination of cultural deference and cautious questioning promoted around Shakespeare in GCE seems designed to construct a petty bourgeoisie which will strive within limits allocated to it without seeking to disturb the system-"it does not want to break the ladder by which it imagines it can climb" (Poulantzas, p. 293).

I will now look more closely and with a historical perspective at the theory, such as it is, which underpins modern literary education. The weakness of the dominant constructions of Shakespeare will be exposed. I will consider the historical conditions in which literary criticism has been endeavouring to maintain its position, finding that the practices imposed so vigorously upon pupils rest not on confident and coherent dogma, but on confused, anxious and pragmatic responses to pressures which continually defy containment. As I

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have said, we may not assume that the ideology of GCE is successfully inculcated: it is undermined both by conflicting tendencies in English society and by its own contradictions. These afford numerous points at which it may be interrogated and challenged.

In 1944, when the Butler Act was passed, making secondary education compulsory for all children and free for those who cannot afford to buy their way into the private system and its network of privileges, the dominant idea of education was the 'classical humanist'. In this approach it is 'the task of the guardian class, including the teachers, to initiate the young into the mysteries of knowledge and the ways in which knowledge confers various kinds of social power on those who possess it ...classical humanism has been associated with clear and firm discipline, high attainment in examinations, continuity between past and present, the cohesiveness and orderly development of institutions. '(24) This is evidently an approach designed to train an elite, and in fact it grew out of the training which was given to the children of the upper and middle classes in the late nineteenth century.

In English Literature classical humanism is exemplified in its original form by Quiller-Couch. He was Professor of English Literature at Cambridge and in a lecture delivered in 1917 he declared that the best kind of education is reading aloud by the teacher and pupils: 'it just lets the author -Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton or Coleridge -have his own way with the young plant just lets them drop "like the gentle rain from heaven", and soak in'.(25)

Children, at least if they are of the right class, will take naturally to Shakespeare. Actually, of course, it is being drilled into them, and we see here the origin of classical humanist ideas in the nineteenth century practice of mechanically construing classical texts -Quiller Couch says the reading should move round the class, 'just as in a construing class'. This is the root of the most mechanical part of the GCE examinations, the compulsory question one designed to show whether the candidate has' done' the text in detail. However, a notion of education designed for the offspring of the gentry and aspiring commercial bougeoisie could hardly survive without adaptation in a society which proclaims equality of opportunity. The necessary adjustment was made by Leavis and his followers, and hence their importance. The Leavisite reader is in a more complex relationship with authority. The great works are there to be discovered, but they are not identical with the established canon, they have to be reappropriated, won back from the upper class dilettantes who have abused them. And the reader does not make this discovery without apparent effort but through a strenuous

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engagement, a serious and deliberate process of discrimination which both tests and develops a personal sensibility. At the same time, the distance from lower-class culture cannot now be assumed. The true literary experience is threatened also from below, by commercialised 'mass' culture, and this too has to be repudiated. It is by such a repudiation that the student recognises the special culture which she or he has entered. In other words, this was an approach for the class-mobile -either those moving from the lower middle class (occasionally working class) towards professional and managerial occupations, or those moving from the established middle class towards professions like education and social work which justify themselves partly in terms of superior acquired knowledge and personal sensibility. The Leavisite does not receive Shakespeare as part of a natural heritage, she or he wins him and fights off the challenge of 'mass' culture (and passes the examination).

The spread of Leavisism through the education system -not through Cambridge, of course, there they were still educating gentlemen, but through schools, colleges of education and redbrick universities -coincided with the post-war extension of secondary education. The study of English Literature was extended vastly and the contradiction between its universalist and meritocratic pretensions became apparent (in 1951 13,000 students entered for A level English, by 1976 it was 66,000).(26) In 1963 G. H. Bantock declared, 'the number who benefit from this sort of task seems to me to be more limited than we commonly admit' and deplored the acquisition of 'a series of analytic tricks which enable a "right" judgement to be arrived at'.(27) In 1964, in a volume entitled Crisis in the Humanities, Graham Hough observed that 'much of English literature up to the threshold of modern times is now as remote as the ancient classics' and that literary criticism on Leavisite lines had become 'a set of special tricks'.(28) This latter complaint is just what we might expect, 'for the whole idea of personal judgement which has to approximate, to received opinion invites exactly that learning of 'tricks'.

During the 1960s, four factors particularly were drawing attention to the curriculum: government pressure for more and better scientists, the anticipated raising of the school-leaving age to 16, the amalgamation of grammar and secondary modern schools into comprehensives and the demand for student participation.(29) They all served to problematise Literature. The first factor seemed initially to require the most strenuous Leavisite address,(30) but the others proved the real threat because they promoted rival student cultures. The strength and pretensions of literary institutions demanded that such benefits be more widely distributed, but how could it be made to

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work? The Newsom Report of 1963, dealing with 'average and below average pupils', betrays an understandable nervousness: 'It is of course within poetry and drama that the use of language goes deepest. Nobody should have to teach poetry against his will, but without it English will never be complete; poetry is not a minor amenity but a major channel of experience. ...How far the great poetry of earlier ages can be introduced with advantage only the teacher can say' (p. 156).

Usually, the problem was said to be that of the young people: they could not appreciate good culture. But it became apparent to sociologists that they had their own, preferred culture: 'Being highly committed to the teenager role tends to go with being an under-achiever (relative to one's I.Q.). ...It also tends quite strongly to go with having a bad conduct record' --notice here the glimmering recognition of subcultural resistance alongside the terminology of hegemonic incorporation.(31) Youth culture was attributed to mass society and the mass media, to earning power and the disturbance of World War II, but it was also a product of the education system which it was perceived as undermining. Education created a hiatus between childhood and work, and organised young people into age-specific institutions where interaction within the institution was bound to be at least as important as the outward purposes of it. The teenage subculture was partly the product of young people's attempts to adjust to the conditions they were required to experience; whilst in many ways this involved a negotiated response which amounted to the incorporation of many of the values of school, it represented in other ways a resistance to it. Because this was manifested in the main culturally, through styles of speech, dress and demeanour, it seemed to confront especially English teaching.

It was possible for educators simply to deplore the influence of youth culture so long as this was the form, mainly, of the lower classes and of those who did not succeed in school (this, of course, was a circular construction). But the spread, from the mid-1960s, of an alternative culture in universities and colleges infiltrated an adversary to high culture into the main fortress where it survives. Even Shakespeare could be appropriated -as in Barbara Garson's play MacBird!, a rock opera of Othello, phrases in Beatles' songs, Hamlet's 'What a piece of work is a man' speech in Hair, Charles Marowitz's 'fringe' adaptations. The typical student now negotiates contradictory worlds --the rock concert and the tutorial --'and whatever the outcome high culture does not retain the centrality which was its original justification. If it is one culture among others then what is it?

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The response from the right was immediate and clear: it had all been a mistake, most people are not educable beyond the acquisition of the basic skills necessary to keep the economy going. Classical humanism was reasserted in the Black Papers of 1969-70 and by Rhodes Boyson, who was to become a Tory education minister -he wanted 'a sense of purpose, continuity and authority' with schools giving 'order, values and, guidance, while teaching skills and knowledge', and felt this would be best achieved by the state 'helping parents to buy the education they! want'.(32) This movement gathered strength through the 1970s and issued, as part of a general collapse of consensus on the welfare state, in the education cuts of the Thatcher governments.

The left was more disorientated by the problematisation of education and culture, since for many decades the Labour Party and the Communist Party alike had accepted that education in roughly its present guise was a good thing and that what was required was 'reform' to equalise opportunities for individuals to benefit from it (see Jones, Beyond Progressive Education, chapters 3,5). This idea was the quintessence of welfare capitalism: the State provides the conditions whereby the individuals can maximise their personal advancement, and thus the economy will grow and everyone will be happy. From the late 1960s, initiatives on the left opened up new kinds of analysis and practice. There was trade-union militancy among teachers. The possibilities of subcultural resistance were theorised, moving on from Basil Bernstein's distinction between elaborated and restricted codes to an analysis of the scope for resistance and negotiation available to subordinate groups;(33) the Language in Use project identified literature as a particular impediment: 'habitual notions about the value and function of all varieties of written English are derived from notions about the language of literature'.34 New publications, and especially the journal Teaching London Kids, discussed ways of developing in the classroom the critical response of working-class children to their social situation: they are encouraged to 'know their place' --not in the customary sense of accepting their subservience, but in terms of understanding their allocated place in the system, what the material determinants of that positioning are and how it might be otherwise.

But despite, and even within, these socialist initiatives, the principal resistance to rightist ideology among left-liberal educationists has been defensive and recuperative. It has sought to enhance the claims for school experience and tended to keep the system going while making sufficient gestures towards the complex and potentially disruptive cultural position of so many pupils. I shall discuss

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three major institutional developments of the 1960s and 1970s: the progressive movement, the Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE), and non-disciplinary humanities programmes. All three were in many ways recuperative, but they admitted oppositional possibilities as well. Literature featured in them because its failure to command the natural universal respect claimed for it seemed to manifest the impasse into which current theory and practice had worked themselves. Often it was invoked to add weight and legitim';tcy to these developments and, conversely, it seemed that they were ways of sustaining Literature. But the outcome was rather, in effect, the further problematising of it as a.concept and of criticism as a practice. And Shakespeare was used increasingly as the supreme token of the viability of Literature, the one unchallengeable instance.

The progressivist movement is usually traced to Rousseau and his Emile, but it has been gathering strength since the late nineteenth century. It stresses not the acquisition of a given set of standards and body of knowledge but the personal fulfilment of the individual; not training for an established slot in society but the discovery and maturation of an authentic self. It is sometimes called 'romantic' because it values creativity and freedom; and it is called 'child-centred' because it assumes that the most valuable experiences can be drawn from the child her- or himself, rather than imposed by the teacher or a curriculum.(35) It advanced rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s, and seemed to offer a way of recuperating Literature, though eventually it calls it into question.

The most important figure in progressivism at the start of this period was David Holbrook, but his work now appears contradictory, recuperative and mystifying. He takes Shakespeare as the ultimate literary experience and argues that what the child will discover in her or his authentic self is a positive response to the play. In Holbrook's English for Maturity, first published in 1961, Shakespeare 'is the touchstone when we discuss literature -we may dispute the value, say, of Pope or Milton, but we can all agree that Shakespeare is a great poet'.36 But now what we get from Shakespeare is not a disciplined training in traditional values but poems 'about the essentials of being': 'by experiencing his work we may come to have a renewed grasp on life, to understand how to live in this post-Renaissance era, fully recognizing our own feeble natures, and accepting the conditions of our lives which are dominated by Time and Death' (English for Maturity, p. 43). The guarantor of the link between Shakespeare and the self is none other than Leavis: his idea of responses to Literature as personal maturation could be used by Holbrook even while others were using his elitism to sustain the

classical-humanist approach. 'We must experience Wordsworth's depression before we can experience his triumph over it. Leavis will encourage us to do this'(37) (compare Pope's reconciliation of nature and the ancients: 'To copy nature is to copy them'). Such determined accommodating of authority with personal freedom obviously masks a theoretical instability (the reader will have noticed the coercive strategies in the quotations above --'we can all agree that'; 'fully recognizing'; 'we must experience'). Holbrook is actually promoting Literature by indirect means and persuading the students to accept his reading as deriving from their experience.

In Holbrook's approach a failure of students to find in themselves Shakespeare as he would have them --as seeing 'the reality of love and creativity in man' --is interpreted not as evidence of a problem with some part of the theory but as the result of interference: 'Answers by students to questions of Shakespeare's attitudes to human nature and love show how the destructive attitudes of the prevalent literary ethos prevent them from being able to respond to the greatest literature' (Exploring Word, p. 2 12). Latterly progressivists have acknowledged that the appeal to personal relevance cannot be so conveniently manipulated. Albert Rowe declares, 'The attempt to impose a minority taste upon the majority was doomed from the start... literary culture is as relative as other forms of culture'.(38) The compromise with the canon is abandoned and even Shakespeare drops out of visibility. Peter Abbs, in a slashing attack on a GCE examiner who was unwise enough to visit his teacher training course, insists: 'In the first place it is, surely, the process we value, the process of children responding in a personal way to literature. It does not have to be Shakespeare'.(39) None the less, Abbs himself, as one student complained, presents 'a literary heritage that supports your own philosophy' (English within the Arts, p. 134): Abbs tends to promote a canon and a syllabus while insisting that he is essentially addressing human values as they offer themselves to the individual subjectivity. This continual collapsing of values back into their alleged source in the mind of the student makes it very difficult for her' or him to inspect the ideological construction of such education.

Progressivist questions have begun to appear on GCE papers, but they tend to smuggle in diverse discriminatory assumptions and the personal invitation may place only the thinnest mask over coercion: 'Give an account of the scene where Caliban first meets Trinculo and Stephano, making it clear in what ways you find it amusing, and what other feelings you have about it' (Cambridge, O level). Initially, the demand for an 'account' suggests that the text is there for

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reasoned paraphrase -the traditional wish to ensure that the candidate has read the play 'properly' is still there. At the other end of the question the appeal is to 'what other feelings you have' -an open-ended appeal to personal impressions. In the middle one must make 'clear in what ways you find it amusing': the response which the examiners have predetermined to be the right one must be discovered. This exerts a pressure on the invitation to express 'feelings' -the possibility that the scene might relate to colonial exploitation (see Chapter 3 above) is not encouraged. That would not be 'amusing'.

Progressivism also underlies invitations to consider Shakespeare's plays in terms of realisation in the theatre -it is part of the appeal to experience and creativity (such questions were set in 1983 by three boards). But theatre questions also may exert a drag back towards the classical-humanist position. Notice how this question starts off with excitement but moves back to precise recollection and the implication that 'the events and characters' are quantities that may be simply known: 'Select what you consider to be the most exciting scene from Romeo and Juliet and show how you would produce it to make the greatest impact on an audience. A close knowledge of the events and characters should be apparent in your production ideas' (Southern, O level). Most boards remain hostile to 'imaginative interpretations' (see below, p. 183).

There is radical impetus in the progressivists' position -in their attack on examinations, on the competitive hierarchy in schools and on the pressure exerted on schools by universities; and in their insistence that children's writing has a validity which challenges that of established Literature. However, from a materialist standpoint the drawbacks of the position are manifest. It reproduces in a particularly potent form the bourgeois ideology of individualism, effacing the historical construction both of the text and the moment in which it is read --not to mention the historical construction of individualism itself. The student is offered no political analysis or direction, but is exhorted to regard as her or his authentic response what can in actuality be only a combination of pressures from society at large and from the teacher in particular. The former will be largely conservative, the latter may be radical in some of its emphases, but its refusal to invite inspection of its own historical and political location must be mystifying. At the same time, progressivism has provided a starting point and a strategy of intervention for socialist teaching.

The principle of appealing to the pupil's experience is transformed if that experience is placed in its political context -'bringing them to an awareness of their social situation in a class-based society through

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the spoken and written word, and affirming the collective strength of their class'. (40)

CSE examinations (the second institutional development which has tended recently to rehandle Literature) began in the mid 1960s, and because they are designed for less 'able' pupils than those taking O level and not involved in the university selection sequence they could cut free from the academic/high-cultural conception of Literature. Almost invariably, a list of twenty or more books is proposed and the candidate answers on the ones he or she has studied; overwhelmingly, the texts are modern and chosen for their supposed appeal to young people; only Shakespeare persists from the traditional canon, and study of his work is not compulsory.

Often CSE questions are open-ended and do little to encourage the customary manoeuvres of literary criticism -'Write about a book, play, or collection of poems that you really enjoyed reading as part of your C.S.E. English Course. Explain what it was that pleased you, and how your experience of people and/or places was enlarged by your reading' (East Anglia, South). This approximates to the way non-professional adult readers think about books (except, of course, that they don't write examination essays about them). Sometimes candidates are invited to rework the books in their own terms -the following question might be applied to Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice or Romeo and Juliet: 'Put yourself in the place of a character, in one of the works you have studied, faced with dangerous situations. (i) Describe the situations, (ii) show how you dealt with them, and (iii) explain the effect(s) of your action(s) or decision(s)' (North West). Such invitations to reconstruct the text undermine its stability and status as the one essential embodiment of the writer's genius; for the reverent 'neutrality' of literary criticism they substitute the manifest appropriation of the candidate. Such questions have spread from CSE to one O level board, the Oxford and Cambridge: 'Imagine that you are the nurse being interviewed by a reporter. Explain your part in the events of the play' (Romeo and Juliet); 'Write an editorial for the Arden Gazette on the recent outbreak of marriage in the district' (in As You Like It; the note of facetiousness is particularly bold and must have found many responses).

I have stressed the subversiveness of CSE, the extent to which it tends to undermine the canon and procedures of Literature. Actually, many of the examination questions are like those usually set at O level and pronouncements of the boards indicate conservative leanings. 'The use of extremely lightweight, modern, romantic authors should not be encouraged or allowed for examination purposes', the North West board declared in its Reports on the 1983

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Examinations; and the South-East paper warned bluntly in its rubric: 'Questions refer to the books you have read, NOT to any radio, television, musical or film versions of them'. The idea of Literature lives on. Nevertheless, for radical teachers the more adventurous lists of texts and open-ended questions have permitted discussions of issues like racism, gender relations and peace, and the development in the students of a critical consciousness capable of analysing the ideological frameworks they encounter -including that of the examination system. Once more we see educational institutions manifesting a confusion of purpose which admits oppositional intervention.

The third institutional development which has been used to help Literature live up to its claims for general relevance is the subsuming of it into 'humanities' programmes. This tendency has made serious inroads into the status and pretensions of Literature, and has proved amenable to politicised teaching (it is related to the; radical contextualising of Shakespeare's plays in Part I of the present study). It was given focus by a Schools Council/Nuffield study, The Humanities Project (Heinemann, 1970), which was produced to coincide with the raising of the school-leaving age (by one year to 16). 'The aim of the Project is: to develop an understanding of social situations and human acts and of the controversial issues; which they raise' (p. I); so the courses consist of a series of themes and issues. Visual material is emphasised; printed material may include 'poems arid songs; extracts from drama, novels and biography; letters, reports and articles; readings from the social sciences; maps, cartoons, questionnaires, graphs and tables; and advertisements' (p. I I). Not much of the traditional or the progressivist exaltation of the literary text will survive such a process. In Themes in Life and Literature, edited by Robert S. Fowler and published by the Oxford University Press (1967) chapter four begins with two- to six-line snippets from 'The Lady of Shalott', 'I know where I'm going' (folk song), Shakespeare's sonnet 18, 'The Wife of Bath's Prologue', The Girl with Green Eyes (Edna O'Brien), A Midsummer Night's Dream, 'Tintern Abbey' and 'Under the Bridges of Paris' (pop song); then there are diverse prose passages. The Bullock Report (1975) was anxious: 'An obvious danger in humanities lessons is for the literature to be selected solely on the ground that it matches the theme, however inappropriate it may be in other ways. Moreover, when a poem or story is enlisted to serve a theme it can become the property of that theme to the extent that its richness is oversimplified, its more rewarding complexities ignored' (p. 132). Thus Bullock would have liked to

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reincorporate those 'literary' aspects which humanities programmes were devised to cover the failure of. It was able to conclude, however, that 'a permanent relationship with the great classics...is traditionally thought appropriate for pupils preparing for examinations' (p. 130). So at least the GCE streams can be kept uncontaminated. Bullock did not say, though it certainly thought, that the traditional approach is politically safer. The Humanities Project envisaged that the teacher would be 'neutral' in the presentation of themes (p. 1) but this was of course a chimera, and the opportunity for radical intervention is manifest. The extent of politicised teaching in humanities programmes cannot be estimated, but its presence is indicated by the hostility shown both by classical humanists and conservative progressivists. Roger Scruton writes in the Daily Mail against Peace Studies and other 'relevant' courses as 'a continuous stream of rubbish' (he moves 'easily into the idiom of the Mail), preferring what he calls 'the "irrelevant" subjects -the great dead languages, higher mathematics, literary criticism' --because they; force 'the pupil to understand something which has no immediate bearing on his experience' (3 February 1984). For the progressivists, Peter Abbs exposes his own politics when he complains that with anthologies about strikes, women's liberation, prostitution, homosexuality and another dozen social issues the approach has become 'sordidly nihilistic. ...We politicize literature at the cost of authenticity' (English within the Arts, p. 22). Strikers, feminists, prostitutes, gays and so on seem to be excluded from the authentic --or is it only when they draw attention to their oppression?

The attempts of these rival theories and practices to cope in problematic historical conditions with the intractability of Literature in the classroom have steadily eroded such coherence and status as it once: had. The 'crisis in English' which has recently been noticed in universities is much more advanced and more far-reaching in schools. There the high-cultural idea, the alleged universal appeal, i and the practices of literary criticism are questioned continuously, and over large areas Literature is slipping out of visibility altogether. This we can observe even in O level and sixth-form work. As this book goes to press it has been decided, after years of hesitation, to amalgamate O level and GCE into one examination with a single scale of grades from 1988. There will be more and less' difficult papers, aimed at preserving the' academic' character of the top grades; whether this will lead to current O level characteristics intruding on the work of more pupils, or to further erosion of

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traditional literary criticism, remains to be seen. Already there are A level rivals to English --Theatre Studies, and Communications. The Schools' Council has endorsed one-year sixth-form English courses which 'propose a direct interest in people in action, in the community and at work, as well as in documentary and poetic presentations of human experience'.(41) And the Associated Examining Board has: introduced a new format of A level English assessment, including an open-book examination and a course-work folder, and involving the i study of texts chosen in schools for their appropriateness in developing pupils' reading experiences; the aims include an extension of 'the range of English studies' and 'opportunity for more varied work' (Dixon, Education I6-I9, pp. 66-70). .

In the new Associated A level, for all that has been said, the study of one Shakespeare play is compulsory. The importance of Shakespeare is perhaps greater than ever, for he is becoming the sole vehicle o£ high-cultural ideology and establishment literary criticism in schools. This is true even in conventional GCE examinations: 'other former rivals in the English literary pantheon -Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson -have faded almost without trace' from O level (Barnes and Seed, Seals of Approval, p. 18), and the tendency is similar at A level. Goulden and Hartley's 'league table' of set texts show Literature to be dispersed over a most eclectic range (' "Nor should such Topics"', p.6). Shakespeare remains as the great witness to the universality of literary experience, but his position is absurd, for he is representative of a category, of a theory, of which he is the only undoubted instance.

The left-liberal consensus which, I have tried to show, has undermined Literature while seeming to recuperate it is itself now under attack from the right. Not only are resources being cut, but the Department of Education and Science is insisting upon traditional disciplines and elitist 'standards'; the Schools' Council, which has been a principal agency of reformist thought, is being abolished and more emphasis is being placed on the Assessment and Performance Unit. The courses provided by the Manpower Services Commission for people leaving school at 16 without jobs force them into practical studies intended to prepare them directly for the labour market (such as it is); there is very little scope there for Literature.(42)

Yet it is unlikely that Shakespeare's significance as a cultural token will diminish --it is too firmly established outside education as well as inside. His name has been the watchword for reactionaries and conservative progressivists alike. For Sir Cyril Burt, who was so determined to demonstrate a hierarchy of innate ability in children that he faked his evidence, Shakespeare's transcendent status is the first

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move in his Black Paper argument: 'No one, not even the most convinced egalitarian, would deny that a few outstanding personalities, like Shakespeare or Newton, are born geniuses' ;(43) recently the Chancellor of the Exchequer has invoked Shakespeare in the same cause (see below, p. 203). David Holbrook appears to present a significant alternative, but his case for the creativity of the 'low IQ' child reincorporates the elitism and essentialism which it might seem to challenge: the child's writing 'was doing for the human mind that produced it, what Shakespeare's Sonnets did for his very great mind at a very different level'.(44) Socialists may challenge these appropriations of Shakespeare. The plays may be taught so as to foreground their historical construction in Renaissance England and in the institutions of criticism, dismantling the metaphysical concepts in which they seem at present to be entangled, and especially the construction of gender and sexuality. Teaching Shakespeare's plays and writing books about them is unlikely to bring down capitalism, but it is a point for intervention.

I On the 'hidden curriculum' see Rachel Sharp, Knowledge, Ideology and the Politics of Schooling (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 123-31; Sue Sharpe, Just Like a Girl (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), ch.4; Michelle Stanworth, Gender and Schooling (London: Hutchinson, 1983).
2 Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), p. 252. See further Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976; London: Routledge, 1976)'; Roger Dale, Geoff Esland and Madeleine MacDonald, eds., Schooling and Capitalism (London: Routledge and the Open University, 1976).
3 Michael Young and Geoff Whitty, 'Perspectives on Education and Society', in Society, State and Schooling, ed. Young and Whitty (Ringmer: Falmer Press, 1977), p. 12. See also in this book Simon Frith and Paul Corrigan, 'The Politics of Education' and Michael Erben and Denis Gleeson, 'Education as Reproduction', and see further Education Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
Unpopular Education (London: Hutchinson and Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1981), ch. 1.
4 Common Cores at A level, prepared by GCE Boards of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (London, 1983). On Shakespeare as National Poet see Derek Longhurst, "'Not for all time, but for an Age"; an Approach to Shakespeare Studies', in Re-Reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson (London: Methuen, 1982).
5 Ministry of Education, Half Our Future (the Newsom Report) (London: HMSO,
1963), p. 155.
6 See Noelle Bisseret, Education, Class, Language and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1979), ch. 2; J. W. B. Douglas, J. M. Ross and H. R. Simpson, All Our Future (London: Panther, 1971), PP.36-41; A. H. Halsey, 'Towards Meritocracy? The Case of Britain', in Power and Ideology in Education, eds. Jerome Karabel and A. H. Halsey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
7 Linda Peffer in Dutiful Daughters, ed. Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 364. See also pp. 336-7.

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8 See Pierre Bourdieu, 'Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction', in Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change, ed. Richard Brown (London: T avistock, ! 1973); and also Bourdieu's papers in Dale, Esland and MacDonald, eds., Schooling and Capitalism. Bourdieu's approach has been criticised by Bisseret in Education, Class, Language and Ideology, ch. 5; and by Sharp in Knowledge, Ideology and the Politics of Schooling, pp. 66-76.
9 Department of Education and Science, A Language for Life (the Bullock Report) ,
(London: HMS , 1,975), p. 131.
10 North West Regional Examination Board: Certificate of Secondary Education, ,
Reports on the 1983 Examinations. For those unfamiliar with the British system:
CSE examinations are taken mainly as a leaving qualification at age 16 by pupils! thought relatively less 'able'; they are set by twelve regional boards. The top grade;
of CSE is regarded as equivalent to a pass in GCE Ordinary (0) level, which is
typically taken at 16. Pupils who 'stay on' may then take Advanced (A) level at 18 ;
or 19. Two A level (and five 0 level) subjects are normally required for university i
entrance, but in many subjects and especially English three A levels are now
necessary. GCE papers are set by nine boards: three are controlled by single'
universities: Cambridge, London and Oxford; six by combinations of universities
or colleges: Associated (AEB), Joint OMB), Northern Ireland, Oxford and Cambridge (not the same as the two separate boards already mentioned), Southern, and Welsh. The Scottish system is different, and points made in the present paper should not be assumed to be applicable to Scotland.
11 Universities of London, General Certificate ot Education Examination: Statistics! (1982). See further Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar, 'Literature as an Ideological Form', Oxford Literary Review, 3 (1978), 4-12; and Madan Sarup, :Marxism / Structuralism / Education (London and New York: The Falmer Press, 1983), pp.41-3, 117-22.
12. See Sharpe, Just Like a Girl; Eileen M. Byrne, Women and Education (London:
Tavistock 1978); Rosemary Deem, Women and Schooling (London: Routledge,
1978); Jenny Shaw, 'Finishing School', in Sexual Divisions and Society, ed. Diana
Leonard Parker and Sheila Allen (London: Tavistock, 1976); Margaret Sandra,
'She's good at English -is English good for her?', Teaching London Kids, 19
(1983), 8-11. On the early development of the relationship between women and
English, see Brian Doyle, 'The Hidden History of English Studies', in Widdowson,
Re-Reading English, pp. 22-5.
13 Irene Payne, 'A Working-Class Girl in a Grammar School', in Learning to Lose, eds. Dale Spender and Elizabeth Sarah (London: Women's Press, 1980), p. 16. See
also in the same book Marion Scott, 'Teach Her a Lesson'.
14 See Ann Marie Wolpe, 'The Official Ideology of Education for Girls', in
Educability.' Schools and Ideology, ed. Michael Flude and John Ahier (London:
Croom Helm, 1974).
15 G. Yarlott and W. S. Harpin, '1000 Responses to English Literature', Educational
Research, 13 (1970-1), 3-11, 87-97; p. 6. .
16 Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals (London:
Hutchinson and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1976), p. 12.
17 Frank Whitehead, A. C. Capey, Wendy Maddron, Alan Wellings, Children and
Their Books (London: Schools Council and Macmillan, 1977), pp. 125-9.
18 Sharp, Knowledge, Ideology and the Politics of Schooling, P.l09. On GCE
English questions, see further Derek Longhurst, "'Not for all time, but for an
Age"', in Widdowson, Re-Reading English; Holly Goulden and John Hartley,
"'Nor should such Topics as Homosexuality, Masturbation, Frigidity.. ."', LTP:
Journal of Literature Teaching Politics, I (1982),4-20; Douglas Barnes and John Seed, Seals of Approval (University of Leeds School of Education, 1981).
19 See Renee Balibar, 'An Example of Literary Work in France', in I848: The
Sociology of Literature, ed. Francis Barker et ale (Colchester: University of Essex,

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1978); and Tony Bennett's identification of a 'metaphysic of the text' in his Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 146-8, 162-8.
20 Perry Anderson, 'Components of the National Culture', in Student Power, eds. Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. ,271. See also Catherine Belsey, 'Re-Reading the Great Tradition', in Widdowson, Re-Reading English.
21 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Brighton: Harvester, 1984; University of
Chicago Press, 1984), p. ,25°.
22 Peter Widdowson, 'Hardy in History: a Case Study in the Sociology of Literature',
Literature and History, 9 (1983), 3-16; p. 13.
23 Poulantzas, Classes In Contemporary Capitalism, pp. ,275, ,29,2. See also
Margaret Mathieson, The Preachers of Culture (London: Allen and Unwin,
1975), ch. 1,2: 'Social and Academic Background of Teachers'.
24 Malcolm Skilbeck and Alan Harris, eds., Culture, Ideology and Knowledge (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1976), pp.26, 28. See 'also Denis Lawton, "Social Change" Educational Theory and Curriculum Planning (University of London Press, 1973), ch.2,3,5,6.
25 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Reading (London: British Publishers Guild, 1947), p. 56. For a full account of the development of English literary criticism in its historical context, see Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1983).
26 See John Dixon, Education I6-I9 (London: Macmillan and Schools' Council,
1979), p. ,2.
27 G. H. Bantock, Education in an Industrial Society, 2nd edn. (London: Faber,
1973), p. 167.
28 In J. H. Plumb, ed., Crisis in the Humanities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964),
PP.l03,99.
2.9 See Michael F. D. Young, 'An Approach to the Study of Curricula as Socially Organized Knowledge', in Knowledge and Control, ed. Michael F. D. Young (London: Collier Macmillan, 1971), pp. 20-2. For a general account of education in the period see Education Group, Unpopular Education; and for an account of literary institutions see Stuart Laing, 'The Production of Literature', in Society and Literature I945-I970, ed. Alan Sinfield (London: Methuen, 1983).
30 See F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto, 1962), and Bantock, Education in an Industrial Society, pp. 145-77.
3 I Barry Sugarman, in Introduction to Moral Education, by John Wilson, Norman Williams and Barry Sugarman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), P.335. On
subcultural resistance see note 33.
32 Rhodes Boyson, The Crisis in Education (London: Woburn Press, 1975), pp. 137, I39-4°, 148. On Boyson and the Black Papers see Education Group, Unpopular Education, PP.200-7; and Ken Jones, Beyond Progressive Education (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 74-86.
33 Bernstein's work goes back to 1958 and is collected in Class, Codes and Control, 3 vols., 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1977): see vol. I. For criticism of Bernstein see Harold Rosen, Language and Class (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972); and W. Labov, 'The Logic of Nonstandard English', in P. P. Gigliogli, ed., Language and Social Context (Harniondsworth: Penguin, 1972). For more recent work on subcultures, see Hall and jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals; Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (London: Macmillan 1978); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); Richard Jenkins, Lads, Citizens and Ordinary Kids (London: Routledge, 1983); Robert B. Everhart, Reading, Writing and Resistance (London: Routledge, I983).
34 Peter Doughty, Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching (London:
University College and Longman, 1968), paper 1, p.42. See further M. A. K.

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Halliday, A. McIntosh and P. Strevens, The Linguistic Sciences and Language
Teaching (London: Longman, 1964); Harold Rosen, Language, The Learner and the School (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
35 See"Skilbeck and Harris, Culture", Ideology and Knowledge, pp. 28-34; Lawton,
Social Change, Educational Theory and Curriculum Planning, ch. 2; Mathieson,
The Preachers of Culture, chs. 7, 8; Jones, Beyond Progressive Education, ch. 2.
36 David Holbrook, English For Maturity, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press,
1967), pp.40-1.
37 David Holbrook, The Exploring Word (Cambridge University Press, 1967),
p. 186. 38 Albert Rowe, English Teaching (St Albans: Hart-Davis, 1975), p. 127. 39 Peter Abbs, English within the Arts (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982),
p.112.
4° Chris Searle, This New Season (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973), p. 52. For
criticism of progressivism see Jones, Beyond Progressive Education; Sarup,
Marxism / Structuralism / Education, pp. 123-7; Nigel Hand, 'What is English?', in Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge, ed. Geoff Whitty and Michael Young (Driffield: Nafferton Books, 1976).
41 Dixon, Education I6-I9, p. 128; see also pp. 29, 35-6,121-8 and, on Communications A level, pp. 70-88. In Theatre Studies a third of the examination is practical; Shakespeare plays are set texts but not compulsory study. Dixon's analysis is limited by his belief that Literature 'is least in need of definition' (p. 43).
On the general disarray in Literature teaching, see Mathieson, The Preachers of
Culture, chs. 13 and 14.
42 See Jones, Beyond Progressive Education, pp. 68-72, 132-8; Education Group,
Unpopular Education, ch. I I.
43 The Black Papers on Education, ed. C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson (London: Davis
Poynter, 1971), p. 47.
44 David Holbrook, English for the Rejected (Cambridge University Press, 1964),
p. 31; see also p. 208.

Note. This paper has benefited immensely from the comments and suggestions of Keith Kimberley, Brian Street, Geoffrey Hemstedt, Michael Butcher, Linda Fitzsimmons and Mark Sinfield. From the errors and clumsinesses which remain not even they could save me.