The Vicious Circle in the Teaching of English

Much has been written in recent decades about the ever-ramifying problems, throughout English-speaking countries in the Western world, besetting the teaching of the discipline of English Literature, in both schools and universities. In the course of these critical accounts, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to what is, arguably, the most serious and urgent issue in this crisis and at the root of the explanation for it: the nexus between what has happened to “English” in the universities, where future teachers are prepared for the school classroom, and the classroom teaching that ensues from that preparation. Then, you have the progression to university study of English by some of those who have excelled at school in this new regime of the subject, to be further indoctrinated in its postmodern model at the university; and, in turn, many of these graduates come back to the classroom as teachers, to further propagate that learning—and so on, and on.

This essay…