English and the Educationalization of Social Problems, 1898-1917

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Ink on Paper: Figurations of the Subject English

Abstract

Traditional constructions of the English curriculum have located the subject’s aims and boundaries in university disciplines of language and literary study. However, this ‘common sense’ perspective on the disciplinary knowledge of schooling fails to account for the ways in which ‘English’ was established in U.S. secondary schools towards the end of the ‘long nineteenth century’ (Trohler, Popkewitz, & Labaree, 2011)—a pivotal time-space in which educational systems were fashioned in modern nation-states to redress a range of ‘social problems’ associated with the health, enlightenment, and productivity of individuals and populations. This paper employs historical and philosophical perspectives from the trans-national work of the Leuven Research Group to examine English education's claims to a modernist project that Smeyers & Depaepe (2008) named the ‘educationalization of social problems’ (Smeyers & Depaepe, 2008)—a prevalent trend towards thinking about education as a focal point for alleviating or solving a range of ‘social’ problems.
The ‘educationalization’ phenomenon has been studied more extensively in Europe than in North America (Smeyers & Depaepe, 2008) and has not explored subject English’s distinctive interventions into modern child-rearing and nation-building (Green & Cormack, 2011). Thus, my paper explores three lines of historical inquiry informed by neo-Foucaultian histories of subject English, poststructural notions of subjectivity, and the educationalization concept. The first section argues that the educationalization concept offers a useful analytic to reconceptualize curricular aims and boundaries that span the first comprehensive books on English teaching published in the U.S. (e.g. Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1903; Chubb, 1902; Hinsdale, 1898). The second section revisits the influential Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools (Hosic, 1917) to highlight how the teaching of language and literature were understood as important means to foster youths’ self-disciplinary capacities and to secure ‘normal’ patterns of sociality, sexuality, rationality, and civic comportment. Third, the paper adopts a governmentality perspective (Foucault, 1979) that eschews both ‘progressive’ readings of educationalization in the US and educationalization’s ‘negative’ connotations among European historians and philosophers.
The paper establishes that the educationalization construct offers a useful perspective on the ways that subject English has played a pivotal role in the modernist pedagogical imperative—inculcating social, moral, economic, and political attributes at the scale of entire populations. At the same time, I argue that a governmentality perspective (Foucault, 1979) offers an important means to recognize how modern governing practices have worked upon and through people’s autonomy and freedom in ways that are not simply repressive, but simultaneously produce and discipline subjectivities. These perspectives attend to histories and cultural politics of English teaching that have been overlooked and obscured by more ‘progressive’ notions of English teaching and educational reform.

Author

• Jory J. Brass, Arizona State University