Sunday Schools and English Teaching: Rereading Ian Hunter and the Emergence of English in the United States

• In Event: Curriculum and the Classroom: Using Theory to Conceptualize Everyday Practice

Abstract

Influenced by the work of Ian Hunter (1988, 1995), this paper reconsiders the historical emergence and descent of secondary English teaching in the United States. It documents historical continuities and discontinuities between the pedagogical archives of the 19th century American Sunday school and turn of the 20th century English education to highlight the pastoral, scientific, and bureaucratic lineage of modern literary education and the ways that subject English has been implicated in practices of pastoral power, discipline, biopower, and governmentality. The paper draws attention to Hunter’s provocative ideas, lays groundwork for more comparative histories of English teaching, and stimulates discussion concerning English’s cultural importance, dangers and normalizing tendencies, and location in historically (dis)continuous networks of power/knowledge.

Author

• Jory J. Brass, Arizona State University