Why we fight

My dad didn’t want me to do an English degree. He didn’t really want me to go to university at all, to be honest: nobody else in my family had ever been, and he didn’t see why it should start with me. He probably wouldn’t have minded if I’d wanted to do something vocational, like Law. But English: no. ‘What use is that going to be, sitting around for three years reading books when you could be out earning?’ he’d grumble. Eventually, my A level English teacher invited him into school for a meeting and explained that there were all manner of things that I’d be able to do as an English graduate, but even when I got into Oxford, there were still rumblings about finding a job in an office somewhere local. We were like Tony Harrison and his dad in the poem ‘Book Ends’: what was between us was not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books, and my desire to study them.

For a huge chunk of my life I have thought that I was never more myself than when I was seventeen, reading anything and everything, walking home from school with a head full of ideas. Over the last few months, I’ve thought that I have never been more myself than I have over the past year, working away on the book that for a long time didn’t have a name but then became Reading Lessons: the books we read at school, the conversations they spark and why they matter. It’s been the distillation of twenty-eight years of teaching English, and of ten or so years before that studying it at school and at university. For most of that time, I realise, I’ve been fighting. Not just to be able to study English at degree level myself, but most importantly – and most fundamentally – against all those voices that tell us that studying English is an indulgence, a frippery, something that will never lead to a serious job of serious work. I’ve fought because it is a fight worth having.

This week, the day after Reading Lessons was introduced to the world in The Bookseller, The Times published an article that illustrates exactly why I’m writing this book. In the article, Emma Duncan describes ‘the decline of English as a subject for study at university’ as ‘a healthy development. Literature is lovely stuff but it’s not a way to earn your bread’. The drop in the number of young people applying to read arts and humanities subjects should be cheered, according to Duncan. Universities do our young people no favours if they pretend that studying English and humanities subjects will lead to a career that will make up for the ‘piles of debt’ that students will rack up during their time at university. Do a STEM subject instead, Duncan recommends – or a degree apprenticeship.

What Duncan argues is nothing new. In the late nineteenth century, one of the objections made to the infant academic discipline of English was that it was a mere indulgence, ‘chatter about Shelley’. Why did people need to study English literature at university, detractors reasoned, when they could read the books themselves at home? What were students of English actually learning, and what were they being examined upon? The subject’s supporters responded by filling the earliest English degrees full of knowledge that could be tested. ‘Mention some of the chief public events that happened during Shakespeare’s boyhood.’ ‘Make a list of Pope’s chief works in chronological order, with brief descriptions.’ ‘Write notes on the Interlude, the Heroic Play, the Opera, and the burlesque or satiric drama before 1800.’ It’s the stuff of knowledge organisers, of retrieval practice and MCQs. One question, set at Manchester in the early 1880s, invited students to give an outline of any one of the Canterbury Tales: the following year, at King’s College London, students were asked to ‘quote any passage from “Christabel”’.

You could be forgiven for thinking that some of today’s arguments about the teaching of English – about powerful knowledge and cultural capital, direct instruction or the shared construction of meanings – are really just a rehashing of these old debates about what kind of subject English actually is. But actually, articles like Emma Duncan’s should remind us that our real battle is a much bigger one. It’s to get people – our students, their parents, employers, politicians, society at large – to recognise the importance of what we do in English, and in the arts and humanities more widely. And we need to fight hard, and passionately, and with commitment.

One of the best and most persuasive books I’ve read recently on the subject of English is Bob Eaglestone’s Literature: Why It Matters (2019). Eaglestone redefines literature not as a particular body of texts – a definition that is notoriously troublesome – but as a ‘living conversation’. It argues that studying literature is about participating in a discourse that is endlessly evolving, adding one’s own voice to the thousands of others that have taken part in this conversation over time. And this is a conversation not just about books, but about ideas: about justice, society and civilisation, equality, relationships and responsibility. It’s a conversation about what it means to be a human being in a world that is currently in a pretty precarious state. As Matthew Sweet said in a tweet on Duncan’s article, ‘Literature isn’t lovely stuff. It’s unsettling, painful, shapes your morals, shows you the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. It asks us questions whose answers aren’t immediately apparent, and confronts us with issues that we need to argue against.

None of this, of course, precludes it from leading to a career. My Twitter timeline is full of people giving examples of what their English, arts and humanities degrees have enabled them to do. In his book, Eaglestone quotes Cathy Davidson’s The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Davidson cites Project Oxygen, launched by Google in 2013, which aimed to identify ‘the qualities that lead to promotion and a successful career’. The top skills for success identified by Project Oxygen included empathy, critical thinking, communicating and listening effectively, and possessing insights into others, including their different values and points of view. Google also stated that its most effective teams were not necessarily those with the highest levels of technical skill, but those whose members displayed empathy and emotional intelligence. Another significant piece of research – the British Academy’s Qualified for the Future, published in 2020 – pointed out that eight of the ten fastest-growing sectors of the UK economy employ more graduates from arts, humanities and social science subjects than from STEM disciplines. It also underlined the crucial role played by the arts and humanities in ‘developing active citizens who can think for themselves and hold authority to account.’

In my more cynical and embittered moments, I think that maybe, just maybe, this holding-to-account is exactly what our current government wants to discourage. I had a long dark night of the soul after last year’s GCSE results when I reasoned that Michael Gove’s 2017 reforms were part of a long-term plan to destroy the subject of English altogether. Make English so dull and unrewarding that nobody wants to do it at A level, run a concerted campaign to undermine the importance of the arts and humanities at degree level, and sit back and rejoice as everyone troops off to do STEM subjects or degree apprenticeships. Schools will still need English teachers, and that problem doesn’t seem to have been addressed, but I’m sure there could be ways round it. (It was a very dark night.)

This needs not to happen. I think of my Year Eights, exploring presentations of Caliban and making connections with the history of colonialism and the dehumanisation of enslaved people; my Year Sevens, learning about displacement and human rights through their work on The Bone Sparrow. I think of the work that I did with Year Ten on toxic masculinity and Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’. I think of my A level English Language group, examining media stereotypes of regional language varieties, and of my A level English Literature students, questioning and challenging representations in texts and gaining so many insights into themselves in the process. I think of all the rich and powerful learning that goes on in English classrooms up and down the country, much of it the kind of learning that could never be measured by any formal metric, but all of it vitally important for the health of our country. I think of the young people who will be inspired to want to do English at university, just as I was, not because it will necessarily lead to a lucrative career but simply because they love it. And I think of myself, at seventeen, and of how bored I’d have been if I’d been persuaded that a degree apprenticeship was a more viable and sensible alternative to studying English, because if degree apprenticeships had existed back then, you can bet your life that I – a kid from a Merseyside comprehensive school, from a family where nobody had ever been to university – would have been steered towards one. This is why English matters, and this is why we must fight for it.