Saving English

Andy Burnham is a Cambridge man. In 1991 he left Fitzwilliam College with a respectable 2.1 degree in English. Has he noticed that the subject he studied is now fighting for its life? Since Burnham graduated, it has gone from being the most popular choice at A levels to a discipline in existential crisis. This is not just a local academic issue but a major national problem — marking the decline of the humanities from which society as a whole is suffering.

Universities and colleges are targeting English departments for severe cuts or closing them altogether. Even prestigious Russell Group institutions like Exeter are not safe; it has recently announced hundreds of job cuts that fall disproportionately on the humanities, with English set to lose 25 percent of its staff. Birkbeck drastically reduced its workforce while repurposing and renaming its department. Goldsmiths has placed key programmes in jeopardy. The same patterns have played out elsewhere, with English often merged into other disciplines for the sake of cost-cutting.

Professional institutions aplenty have highlighted the scale of the crisis: the British Academy, the Institute for English Studies, the English Association, University English. Prominent writers have done the same. But there has been no concerted public campaign and politicians have not listened. It looks set to be more of the same with Burnham, who, despite his own academic background, wants to accelerate the transition to ‘vocational’ learning: allowing the humanities to die so that higher education can be reoriented towards the demands of the labour market. 

In Manchester, Burnham pushed through the MBACC qualification which forces children to make career choices at fourteen – setting them on a life trajectory before they have been exposed to so much of what culture has to offer, in a regression to Victorian norms of education. Now he is imposing this Gradgrind agenda across the country, pushing jobs-based syllabus that tries to draw a hard distinction between subjects that are ‘useful’ and those that aren’t (based, of course, on what employers want). It’s clear which category English falls into. 

So we are left with a strange paradox. English is a global language with 1.49 billion speakers. It has long been unquestioningly, maybe excessively revered as the mother tongue of Milton, Blake, Austen, Dickens and Woolf, and it has gradually become the world’s default way of communicating, in fields from diplomacy to aviation, business to tourism. Omnipresent across trade, science, law and international treaties, it has expanded even further thanks to the internet. This linguistic hegemony has acted as a readymade form of British softpower. And yet its country of origin is making strenuous efforts to eliminate it as a serious discipline. As it continues to spread abroad, English has atrophied at home. 

It helps to remember how this cultural vandalism started. First, Michael Gove’s 2014 reforms replaced a secondary school system based on continuous assessment, modular exams and course work with one solely focused on rote examination, while at the same time narrowing the curriculum. Open-ended reading was no longer a key part of literary education. Primary schools prepared for this new regime by shifting teaching towards spelling, punctuation, grammar and computer coding, in lieu of more creative approaches. While social media has often been blamed for the dearth of reading among children, it’s clear that the excruciating boredom of the syllabus bears much responsibility. Enjoyment, that spur to learning, has disappeared 

Second, a false dichotomy has been set up between the world of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and that of SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts for the People and Economy). This has fuelled the perception of English as irrelevant in the contemporary world, when it is surely more important than ever. In the age of the polycrisis, when many of the old structures and certainties are crumbling, it is essential to cultivate one’s faculties for critical thought, lucid analysis, ethical judgement and imaginative expansion. To teach English, both at an early and at an advanced level, is to empower someone with a living language that opens up the expressive and analytical power of words: to give someone the training they need to turn their everyday means of communication into a creative medium. 

A society needs to have this kind of collective living language. You might be a Geordie, a Brummie, a speaker of so-called ‘standard’ English or a non-native one, but you will inevitably engage in various acts of linguistic recognition: in a process of dialogue between distinct communities of language users in which they respond to and learn from one another. Becoming aware of and attentive to one’s language strengthens this social process. It also sharpens the ability to recognise when language is abused: to defend against the inauthentic uses of language, whether it’s the propaganda of politicians, the subtle untruths of the media, or the alienation of AI.

A shared language, moreover, allows all of us to become participants in our cultural traditions. Literature is a culture’s way of understanding itself over the shifting course of history. It is not our ‘cultural heritage’ in a static and remote sense, but a dynamic corpus of texts that is continually being revised and constantly finding new relevance. Every reader unfreezes literature’s history so that it can mean something for the present. 

It’s obvious that these areas of expertise carry over to the workplace, if that’s where one wants to take them. But there is also a third element that is supremely important for civil society. It is not possible to teach English without dialogue between the teacher and the student, and indeed between the students themselves. The core of the discipline is group discussion: collective analysis of the text and enquiry into it, a shared analysis of language, which recognises that knowledge emerges not through some purely private, inward-looking process but through praxis, usage, interchange. 

Students who understand this dialogism can then better understand how to negotiate with one another in a democratic society, how to use their intellectual resources and political imaginations to persuade, articulate, criticise and convince. This is a capacity that needs to be protected in light of a rising far right that wants to destroy our collective cultures, and an increasingly repressive state that wants to criminalise those it disagrees with. If politicians like Burnham refuse to understand the unique abilities that studying English can instil, then others will have to come to their defence.