Towards Engagement with the Ideas of Ian Hunter: An Argument for an Overdue Encounter

Abstract

IntroductionIn 1988 the cultural policy theorist Ian Hunter produced a genealogy of literary culture, which included a reappraisal of the origins, the purposes and the pedagogies of English teaching during the period of the inception and development of popular education, from the early decades of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. In a review of Culture and Government (1988), Brian Doyle (1990, 146) described the book as 'the most important and original study of the history and sociology of English in education to date' and made clear that this was an application of Foucauldian analysis that superseded 'dominant ideology or social control' theses, which is to say, it offered a more convincing version of the subject's history than the hitherto dominant Marxist or sociological accounts. Over the last twenty years the arguments presented in Hunter's book, and in his subsequent writings, have gone almost entirely unengaged by researchers and teachers in subject English. 1 Culture and Government, an application of Michel Foucault's ideas about disciplinary technologies and governmentality, is as upsetting of liberal understandings of English as it is of radical constructions. It stages an unremitting assault upon liberal progressive histories of English, which may explain why it was apparently refused review in the NATE journal, English in Education. 2 A review of Hunter's later book on mass education, Rethinking the School (1994) described 'a merciless blitzkrieg on … liberal and critical theory' which was 'startling, shocking' and 'frightening' (da Silva, 1995, 317). One can imagine that the earlier book would have had a similar impact upon an English teaching orthodoxy still in thrall to the emancipatory convictions of English as personal growth. As we shall see, Hunter depicts English as the convenient instrument of a bureaucratic technology aimed at the moral shaping of the citizenry required by modern nation states. Its sole and unsurpassable function is to mould a biddable subjectivity as defined by an expert, governmental elite, and -this is one of the points where his analysis departs from politically radical theorisationssuch a function is not to be sneered at by critical intellectuals, because government has the right and responsibility to develop self-governing and conformable citizens. English teaching's dreams of liberation, of an individual or a collectivist stripe, are no more than the delusions of theorists and practitioners infected by an irredeemably unworldly and reflexly oppositionalist misunderstanding of the limits of their knowledge and expertise. English's neglect of Hunter cannot be accounted for by what must

The Examined Life

“… 2 There is no space here for anything but a very limited treatment of Hunter’s argument; for a more detailed and critical consideration I refer the reader elsewhere (Cherryholmes, Symes, & Yates, 1995; Goddard, 2006, 2009; Hunter, 1995). …”

Sunday Schools and English Teaching: Re-reading Ian Hunter and the Emergence of ‘English’ in the United States

“…However, Hunter's work has garnered little uptake internationally in the area of English educationat least outside of a few histories of English teaching in England (Donald 1992;Peel 2000), Canada (Morgan 1990(Morgan , 1995 and Australia (Green and Cormack 2008;Meredyth and Tyler 1993;Patterson 1993Patterson , 1997Patterson , 2000. As a result, much of the field has missed an opportunity to reconsider English's past in less self-serving terms and engage historical perspectives and critiques that might stimulate and challenge thinking and practice with respect to the subject's present and possible futures (Morgan 1990(Morgan , 1995Hunter 1996b;Green, Cormack, and Reid 2000;Green 2004;Goddard 2009). …”