Page 247 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

236 ENGLISH STUDIES

journals (Literature and History, Screen and Screen Education but also Ideology
and Consciousness, Wedge and Red Letters) have come to be something of a
second intellectual network, with a potential capacity to develop further towards
other issues, audiences and ways of working.
However, it has been in secondary schools and with the ‘least able’ pupils of
conventional euphemisms that modes of English teaching have become the most
flexible site for an expanded set of interests: in ways of communicating (from
spoken languages to film and video); in textual representations (including those
of race and gender); in questions or democratic organization of the media, of
teaching and learning themselves. Encouraged by the Mode 3 CSE
examinations, which are teacher-influenced, and by a wider definition of English
in television programming for schools, this work has been a decisive advance
within the crucial ‘progressive’ practices of post-war teaching. Teaching London
Kids, the new English Magazine, Radical Education, Socialist Teacher and
others have articulated its development. Precisely this work stands to lose most,
if it can survive at all, in the attempted restructuring of the educational field
around ‘standards’ and ‘the needs of industry’.
Divisions of labour in educational work have in these ways become advanced
and carefully patrolled since the 1944 settlement: the expansion and
diversification of degree work in higher education has ironically coincided with
uncertainty and a loss of momentum in secondary teaching as ‘progressive’
practices have faced internal and external criticism. In addition, Leavis’s
Education and the University was a considered and far-reaching challenge to
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the place occupied by universities, to which there has been no adequate reply or
successor. Instead, university workers have often remained arbiters and
authorities, at worst in charge of systems of examination, at best as referees of
the practices of others, ‘standing above society’. Even the best exploratory work
of theory has then been defined, potentially, as oppressively academic rather than
as a resource or a contribution, since a communality of purpose, even of shared
debate within English studies, exists in only the most fragmentary ways. Our
own aim would be to develop work at least partly of interest to, and for use in,
schools, though not ourselves above reciprocally learning from and about the
development of school English practices in this century. It was Balibar’s Les
Français Fictifs and then our own work on the literary formation in the 1930s
which began to make connections for us between the teaching of English and the
relations of the ‘literary’ canon to the marginalized ‘non-literary’. 39

Cultural practices
Ken Worpole has cited figures which, in his view, ‘represent a scale of
alternative, or oppositional, publishing probably not seen in this country since
the growth years of the Chartist movement in the 1830s’. The The
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development of feminist and Left theatre groups and the prominence of
committed playwrights in major institutional spaces (the National Theatre, peak-