English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy

Emerging Choice in London Schools, 1945-1965

P. Medway, J. Hardcastle, G. Brewis, D. Crook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137005137
• eBook ISBN: 9781137005144
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: History

Conflicting conservative and radical impulses in English society after WWII were played out in microcosm in education. They particularly shaped English teaching, examined in three post-war London schools in a detailed study that uses oral history—interviews with former teachers and students—and documents including mark books and students' work.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

“Sometimes I see my task, as poet and story-teller, to rescue the centuries’ treasure before it is too late. It is as though the past is a great ship that has gone ashore, and archivist and writer must gather as much of the rich squandered cargo as they can.”¹

As our choice of opening quotation from the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown suggests, the spirit of the studies we have been undertaking has in part been one of “rescue archaeology” within the field of a school subject, except that our inquiry has gone beyond the sort of artifacts, like documents, that sometimes survive shipwrecks, and started—though it didn’t end—not with relics like documents but with what was preserved in memory. Indeed it started with a simple realization by Hardcastle and Medway that the opportunity had been missed to record the memories of key figures from an earlier generation while they were still able to be interviewed. We accordingly visited a major contributor to the development of the teaching of English, Harold Rosen. We recorded two interviews with him, in 2004 and 2005, from which, in the course of conversations over subsequent years, the larger intention evolved to do something toward filling out, refining, and correcting existing accounts of the postwar history of English up to the mid-1960s, the period in which Harold and others had brought about some decisive changes. Gradually a substantial funded research project emerged, which we think has indeed preserved a portion of the past’s “rich squandered cargo” and, beyond that, we hope, has afforded a basis for fresh thinking about the development of a school subject within the context of its times.

This book is an account of that project and a contribution to two specialist studies, curriculum history and the teaching of English, though we hope it will also appeal to those with a wider historical interest in the earlier post–World War II decades. The period we cover, 1945–1965, is one of fascinating change in Britain, from austerity combined with optimistic attempts at reconstruction under a Labour government to rising affluence and a new consumer economy under the Conservatives (with Labour taking over again right at the end) and, accompanying that, the beginnings of far-reaching movement in cultural life. The extent to which and the way in which those social changes bore on what English teachers did in their classrooms in English secondary schools was a question we have pondered continually but that proved to yield no single answer across our cases, though this is not to say that our studies do not illuminate what was happening in society more generally—they certainly do. But that is to anticipate.

Contribution to Curriculum History

The particular contribution that the book hopes to offer to curriculum history derives from the special nature of English. Among the central academic subjects in postwar secondary schools in England, English had features that marked it as different from geography and chemistry. Despite its apparent status as central, its arrival in the curriculum had been relatively recent and its place was for many years insecure. In the universities, English was accepted by the 1830s in London but in Oxford and Cambridge only in 1893 and 1917, and in some major independent (nonstate) schools English was still not included within our own lifetimes, literature being deemed not a real study but a matter of subjective taste appropriate only for leisure pursuit, while competence in reading and writing was assumed to have been taken care of at an earlier stage of schooling. A government report of 1921 on the teaching of English (the Newbolt Report)² had to argue vigorously for its admission in schools at a time when the sciences, history, and modern languages were well established. English was unusual as a major subject, secondly, in not essentially comprising a body of facts and concepts to be learned; those specifiable items that it taught—spellings, for instance, or grammatical rules, or the meaning of “fiery cressets” in a Shakespeare play—did not constitute the principal substance of what English was seen by at least some of its practitioners to be essentially about. Much of what English did teach or foster, moreover, was neither new to the learners nor exclusively obtainable from the teaching, since in one sense English was what all native speakers were doing all the time already. Indeed, not only was pupils’ English being continuously practiced and extended outside school; it was also learned within school, in other subjects, wherever reading, writing, and speaking were engaged in, a point that would be made much of in the “language across the curriculum” initiatives of the 1970s.

These considerations make clear that, to be comprehensive, a theory of the development of curriculum has to take adequate account of the exceptional case of English as well as the more “normal” academic subjects. Work on which we have drawn includes the theory of curriculum history (e.g., Barker 1996, Franklin 1999), teacher life histories (Goodson 2003), studies of individual London schools (e.g., Limond 2002), and historical accounts of the teaching profession (McCulloch et al. 2000).³

A curriculum history movement that began in the late twentieth century has provided insights into the development of subjects, subject associations, and school textbooks.⁴ This study is specifically indebted to earlier, now rather dated, histories of English teaching (reviewed in chapter two) that offered general accounts drawing mainly on published sources, but it takes them forward by locating evidence about individual schools, classrooms, and teachers within and against those accounts of the general sweep of the subject. This was very necessary because the literature of the 1970s and 1980s presented a story of English that was partial and oversimplified. What we have added has been in some ways a response to Harold Silver’s 1992 call for a “social history of the classroom.”⁵ Since Silver wrote these words there have been some important studies that have risen to the challenge, but perhaps nothing comparable in aims and methods to what was undertaken in this research into English. Our work adds another dimension in that respect to earlier studies of English, but we have also been concerned to rectify notions that we have found to be misleading. These include the apparent orthodoxy that what supplanted traditional English teaching was a 1960s “New English” that subordinated intellectual development to creativity, expressivity, and reading for enjoyment, and, and that the preceding period was largely stagnant and was dominated by textbooks containing abstract grammatical exercises and literature lessons focusing on the appreciation of long-dead great authors.

We have also been impressed by historians of education who have worked with broader methodologies, such as materiality and oral history,⁶ and by scholarship exploring connections between content, theory, and history⁷ and demonstrating the potential for ethnography and school studies to illuminate understandings of curricula.⁸ What we add, that we hope takes account of this work, is a case study approach that enables us to examine English teaching as it was thought about, practiced, and experienced in three London schools. The research employs mixed methods, bringing a strong dimension of “voice” from oral testimony but also drawing widely on unpublished documentary sources retrieved from the schools and provided by informants, all of which add concrete particularity and often vividness to the story. But also, because we remain alert to possible connections between the history of the English classroom and broader developments in postwar British society, we make reference to the writings of social historians and cultural commentators, particularly in chapter two. On this question, although we have arrived at no simple formulation, the detailed and experiential character of our data, offering many glimpses of individual experiences of what Philip Jackson long ago called “life in classrooms”⁹—and staff rooms—will certainly be of interest to social historians.

In short, we offer to curriculum history an account of what can be learned by examining very local phenomena in as much detail as the available evidence allows, given the passage of two-thirds of a century, while keeping in mind what was happening in education in general and society and culture in general.

Contribution to Understanding English Teaching

As a topic, English teaching in the first two decades after the Second World War has not been well served by historians. The main subject histories of English on which we have drawn will be reviewed in chapter two and further assessed in chapter six.¹⁰ The period has been passed over without close attention under the assumption that it was largely a period of unthinking continuation of prewar practices, in a context of few comprehensive schools until the 1960s and with hopes disappointed for a new sort of education in the post-1944 secondary modern schools, while grammar school education was reduced to a grind for examination passes at 16 and 18, dominated by rote learning. While there is some truth in that picture, one contribution of this book will be to show that, in places at least, English was a livelier business than the histories suggest, sometimes far livelier. A major motivation in our studies was to begin to write a more adequate and nuanced account (only begin, because in terms of the new data it brings this is a local and particular inquiry). We will show that, at least on the evidence of three good schools (deemed to be good at the time, that is), the picture is more complicated than the literature implies. Coexisting in schools there were different generations of teachers and different notions of English deriving from trends that changed over time in the teaching of English in higher education and in teacher training; teachers learned and changed in the course of their careers, for a variety of reasons including changes in the discipline of English and a new sense of political and cultural possibility. The children and young people in the schools also changed over the 20 years, so that teaching that “worked” in 1948 didn’t in 1963, inclining teachers to look for new solutions.

It is a serious limitation of existing histories of English that they rely almost exclusively, as Ball et al. acknowledge,¹¹ on “the public rhetorics and discourses” comprising books and articles about and for English, without evidence about the English teaching and the pupils’ learning that actually went on in schools. Moreover, if existing work uses teachers’ oral testimony very sparingly, it draws on that of former pupils not at all, nor on the written evidence of the work they did. The crucial difference in our study has been that its core comprises just three case studies, so that instead of breadth we have gone for depth so as to contribute to a truer and fuller picture of the subject by bringing to the history detailed evidence about the practice and thinking of a relatively small number of teachers. Our evidence from those schools is of two kinds: oral testimony from former teachers and pupils and documentary evidence including pupils’ work, school syllabuses, and teachers’ mark books and lesson notes. In the light of what we learn from the case studies we are able to place the earlier histories in a new light, at least by raising new questions, bearing in mind always that case studies are local and say nothing conclusive about the general scene, a relationship that Silver (1983) discusses at length, suggesting: “A study of historical detail, of an instance, of a unique event, may point towards wider generalizations, the need for sustained revision.”¹²

In the history of English in schools there has long been a need for this particular kind of study. Commenting in his 1990 survey of English in the 1950s and 1960s, based entirely on published sources, Medway observed:

Little direct evidence is available of what English consisted of in practice in the diversity of settings in which it took place: gaining reliable knowledge of that would require a major research study employing such methods as the collection of school syllabuses, stock lists and surviving pupil work, interviews with former teachers and pupils and a study of textbook sales.¹³

This is such an attempt, pursued through the collection of exactly that sort of material, albeit within the narrow compass of three London schools.

And since we hope to engage readers who bring practical concerns about how English should be taught as well as historical interest, we try to illuminate what seems of permanent educational value in some modes of English teaching that tend to have been dismissed as unthinking persistence in traditional methods, as well as in what was and remains important in the innovations introduced by teachers like Rosen. Although our story is by no means all about “reforms,” Harold reminded us of the determination with which these have had to be fought for in the past and confirmed our resolve to record what was achieved and how: “But what I am saying is, we have to record all this . . . not just mentally. It is about saying there was another way. And some of the best teachers of our generation, generations, fought for that.”¹⁴ At the same time, while there was a way that was “better” than the sterility of much English teaching in all types of school in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, we have to record what we find admirable in some grammar school practice, although it was experienced by a selective group of the school population.

The Research: Aims, Design, Methods

The research project from which this book derives was entitled “Social Change and English: A Study of Three English Departments 1945–1965.” It ran from 2009 to 2012, was funded by the Leverhulme Trust,¹⁵ was directed by John Hardcastle at the Institute of Education, University of London, and was derived from earlier studies by him and by Peter Medway of King’s College London. They were joined by David Crook of the Institute and then by Mary Irwin who was succeeded after the first year by Georgina Brewis, with Patrick Kingwell as a volunteer researcher conducting interviews and taking part in project planning, archival research, and presentations.

As we have said, the idea of an ambitious funded project developed only gradually out of an initial realization that we and everyone else had already missed the chance, because of their deaths, to collect systematically the memories of important figures in English teaching, including James Britton, Nancy Martin, and Alex McLeod, people whom Hardcastle and Medway knew and had worked with. We made amends in two sessions with our former tutor, Harold Rosen, before he became too ill. In particular we learned about his time in the 1950s as head of English at Walworth School (a very early comprehensive), where Medway later (1963–1971) did his teaching practice and had his first job. We wanted to know more about Walworth in the period before we started teaching, and also to investigate Hardcastle’s school, Hackney Downs (comprehensive in John’s time, previously a grammar school). Both schools, we knew, had been influential in the development and dissemination of new approaches to English. We added a third school, Minchenden Grammar, also well known for its contribution to developments in the teaching of English, and applied for a grant.

The design of our research reflected our wish to do something different from the earlier studies we have mentioned. Whereas their sources had mainly been publications in which teachers and teacher educators set out their thinking about the subject, described how they taught it, and explained how they thought it should be taught, we wanted to obtain evidence of their practice. While what teachers told us in interviews was not necessarily more reliable than what some might have written, face-to-face interaction would enable us on the one hand to ask supplementary questions to clarify what they had told us and on the other to check their narratives against interviews with other teachers and former pupils, and against surviving documents such as lesson notes, mark books, and pupil work.

These priorities dictated that we work intensively on a small number of schools in order to construct relatively deep, richly concrete, and fine-textured histories. Three schools was the most to which we felt we could do sufficient justice. Such narrowly focused studies enable researchers to take account of particularities of situation and context the possible significance of which general...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction
• 2   The Period, the Education System, and the Teaching of English
• 3   Hackney Downs
• 4   Walworth
• 5   Minchenden
• 6   The Three Schools—What We Have Learned
• 7   Conclusion
• Notes
• Index