Historicizing English pedagogy: the extension and transformation of 'the cure of souls

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Historicising English pedagogy: the extension and transformation of 'thecure of souls'Jory Brassa

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Pedagogy, Culture & SocietyVol. 19, No. 1, March 2011, 153–172

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Historicising English pedagogy: the extension and transformation of ‘the cure of souls’

Jory Brass*

615 T Teachers College, University of Cincinnati, PO Box 210022, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USATaylor and FrancisRPCS_A_548997.sgm10.1080/14681366.2011.548997Pedagogy, Culture and Society1468-1366 (print)/1747-5104 (online)Original Article2011Taylor & Francis1910000002011Dr [email protected]

This paper historicises familiar assertions that English is qualitativelydifferent from other school subjects to highlight historical commitmentsand sociopolitical effects of English teaching that are often obscured incontemporary pedagogical writing. It juxtaposes three differentpedagogical literatures across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to illustrate how English teaching has been – and largelyremains – linked in important ways with pastoral Christianity, the socialsciences, and a range of governmental objectives of ‘modern’, welfarestates. The paper denaturalises contemporary pedagogical distinctions andpractices by highlighting how they largely reiterate pastoral logics anddisciplines of nineteenth-century Sunday school pedagogy. In addition, itexamines historical continuities and discontinuities that sensitise us to the(un)changing ways in which English pedagogy has been implicated inpractices of social regulation, productive power, and larger struggles overtelling the ‘truth’ about one’s self, others, and the world.

Keywords: English teaching; curriculum history; literature; cure of souls

We have and hold larger, more complex goals as English educators andEnglish teachers than many of those outside our field are willing to imagine.While we may want to teach our students, Kindergarten–adult, to read, write,and create texts in a variety of forms and genres, we also want to do no lessthan help them change their world. If this seems overly idealistic, naïve, oreven subversive to the many who see education as the accumulation of facts orthe hoarding of cultural capital, so be it. It’s simply who we are. (Alsup et al.2006, 292)

Many education scholars and classroom teachers have characterised English asqualitatively different from other school subjects. Such claims are not restrictedto geographical borders. Scholars from England, Australia, Canada, and theUSA have noted, for example, that English teachers describe their work asconcerned with more than ‘facts’ or ‘knowledge’ and more than simply teachingreading and writing, or literature and language (Medway 1980; Morgan 1990;Peel, Patterson, and Gerlach 2000). Instead, it is not unusual for accounts of

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English to associate less didactic classroom practices, such as response to liter-ature, self-reflection, and expressive writing, to ‘larger’ (and often highlyabstract) aims, such as autonomy and personal growth (Dixon 1967), democracy(Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford 1989), and social justice (Morrell 2005; Miller andFox 2006). In the position paper quoted above, for example, the US Conferenceon English Education (CEE) has posited that the point of English education isnot simply to teach students ‘to read, write, and create texts in a variety of formsand genres’ or ‘accumulate facts or cultural capital’ – it is

to prepare learners to be creative, literate individuals; contributors to thecultural, social, and economic health of their communities; and fully participat-ing and critically aware citizens of our democracy in a complex, diverse, andincreasingly globalized world. (Alsup et al. 2006, 281)

These sorts of formulations have helped to define and legitimate the study ofEnglish in secondary schools, constitute teachers’ sense of professional iden-tity, and outline visions for the future of English education. My goal in this arti-cle, however, is to historicise these largely taken-for-granted representationsof English teaching to get a different sense of what might be at stake in a schoolsubject that has connected non-didactic pedagogical practices with ‘larger’goals, such as the cultural, economic, and civic health of individuals and thepopulation. My approach here is genealogical (Foucault 1980) in the sense thatI have set up deliberate conjunctures of three different pedagogical literaturesto highlight some of the lineage of these sorts of claims and to fashion historicalstandpoints on English education’s present and future. This historical inquiryillustrates how English teaching has been – and largely remains – linked inimportant ways with the work of pastoral Christianity, the social sciences, andthe governmental objectives of modern, liberal democracies.1

English teaching and the cure of souls

To begin to develop an historical perspective on English’s distinctive peda-gogy and its ‘larger’ curricular aims, I would like to revisit two of the firstaccounts of English teaching published in US English education – HiramCorson’s (1896) The Aims of Literary Study and Percival Chubb’s (1902) TheTeaching of English in the Elementary and the Secondary School . Amongother things, this enables me to highlight largely forgotten associationsbetween English pedagogy and pastoral Christianity. In Chubb’s influentialtext, for example, one can recognise a rhetorical pattern that overlaps inimportant ways with the 2006 quote that opened this paper (Alsup et al. 2006).In 1902, Chubb wrote that ‘the duty and privilege of English teaching’ wasnot only teaching English

for its linguistic values, for the making of intelligent readers and capable writersand speakers; but for its large cultural values – for the spiritual enlargement,


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clarification, and discipline of young hearts and minds and wills, which are tobe touched to finer issues by its potent ministry. (1902, ix)

Despite being separated by just more than a century, Chubb (1902) and Alsupet al. (2006) have offered strikingly similar accounts of English teaching as‘larger’ than simply teaching reading, writing, and so on. Unlike contemporarypedagogical writing, however, Chubb’s (1902) text couched this ‘larger’project in overtly Christian language. English pedagogy was reasonably distinctin the sense that it was a ‘potent ministry’ aimed at the ‘spiritual’ enlargement,clarification, and discipline of young people’s hearts, minds, and wills. Chubbrepeated a similar sort of argument at several key junctures in his classic text.In the book’s closing paragraph, for example, he opted for Christian languageto distinguish English teachers’ work from a ‘commonplace professionalism’.English teachers were not primarily purveyors of knowledge, but had joinedthe growing ranks of a lay priesthood called to the cure of young souls:

We [English teachers] need not fear to set the highest humanitarian standardsfor ourselves. Our danger is less that of unduly magnifying our teaching officethan of dropping to the level of a commonplace professionalism. We shouldcome nearer to being priests than purveyors; and indeed, it is in the growth ofthe feeling that is beginning to pervade our ranks of our being a lay priesthood,called to the cure of young souls, that we have cause for highest hope.(Chubb1902, 392–3)

Present-day readers may not be familiar with the notion of ‘the cure of souls’,but the phrase is important as it has spanned more than 1500 years of Christianteaching and had much older precursors in Greek philosophy, Hebrew scrip-ture, and other spiritual traditions (McNeil 1977). Derived from the Latin curaanimarum, ‘the cure of souls’ (also translated ‘care of souls’) historically hasdefined the proper exercise of authority for those who sought to interveneupon other people’s moral, physical, and spiritual well-being. The ‘soul’ wasof central importance in these formulations as it was believed that comprehen-sive well-being was not only contingent upon a healthy mind and body, butmore importantly, a healthy soul. In its Christian usage, the cure of souls delin-eated the duties of a priest within a parish (e.g. sacraments, teaching), as wellas pastoral techniques (e.g. spiritual disciplines, healing, confession) designedto put people in right relationships with their self, others, and God. Thus,Chubb’s use of the phrase linked English teachers to a range of clergy, proph-ets, shaman, philosophers, community elders, and missionaries who, for morethan a millennium, had sought to intervene upon people’s ‘souls’ to contributeto their personal welfare, as well as the comprehensive well-being of a ‘flock’,parish, territory, or nation (McNeil 1977).

In my reading, Chubb’s use of the phrase ‘the cure of souls’ was more thana chance metaphor for English teaching. Rather, English’s pedagogical litera-ture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century overlapped in important


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ways with established literatures of Christian missions and pastoral care whenit linked English teaching to the comprehensive well-being of individuals andthe nation – and not simply the inculcation of knowledge. Chubb (1902), forexample, argued that the ‘master motive of literary discipline and nurture’ wasnot the teaching of knowledge, but ‘the spiritual enlargement, clarification, anddiscipline of young hearts and minds and wills’ (Chubb 1902, ix). One canrecognise a similar distinction in the pedagogical writing of Chubb’s influenceand contemporary, Hiram Corson. Opening with a Biblical allusion – The letterkilleth, but the Spirit giveth life (2 Corinthians 3:6) – Corson’s (1896) The Aimsof Literary Study also drew a distinction between educating (only) the mind andeducating the spirit: ‘The acquisition of knowledge’ and ‘sharpening of theintellect’ were good things, Corson wrote, but there was something ‘infinitelymore important’ than developing people’s minds – augmenting, rectifying, andadjusting their souls, or the ‘what is’. According to Corson, the education ofthe soul should transcend all other aims of education because it was only byworking through the ‘what is’ that literary education could guide the ‘whatdoes’ and the ‘what knows’ towards righteous ends (1896, 13–14).

These excerpts and allusions suggest largely unacknowledged linksbetween English pedagogy and pastoral Christianity (Hunter 1988; Morgan1998; Patterson 2000a, 2000b). However, a few scholars, including Ian Hunter(1988), have linked the emergence of English in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century to a particular institution of pastoral Christianity – the Prot-estant Sunday school. Hunter’s work has garnered little uptake in England andother Anglophone countries (Goddard 2009) – and virtually no uptake in USEnglish education. However, as I will show, one can recognise historicalcontinuities between the pedagogical writing of the Sunday school movement,such as John Todd’s (1838) The Sunday School Teacher and Joshua Fitch’s(1840)2 The Art of Securing Attention in a Sunday School Class, and Englisheducation texts published around the turn of the twentieth century (Corson1896; Chubb 1902). These historical links with Sunday schools are important,I argue, because they help account for several distinctions and pedagogicaltechniques that have constituted English education’s claims to a distinctivepedagogy and ‘larger’ aims than other school subjects.

Literary pedagogy in the nineteenth-century Sunday schoolThe European Sunday school movement began in England in the 1780s(Lacquer 1976),3 but it did not really take hold in the USA until the 1810s and1820s, during the gradual, uneven, contentious, and largely piecemeal disestab-lishment of state religion (Fraser 1999). As their name suggests, Sundayschools met on Sundays – the Christian Sabbath – to inculcate basic literacyand Christian discipline. From the early to middle nineteenth century, USSunday schools operated independent of the state, Christian denominations,and established churches; instead, they were loosely co-ordinated through the



American Sunday School Union (ASSU) and facilitated by Protestant laypersons – minimally paid men and women (or volunteers) with no specialisedtheological or pastoral training. The ASSU, along with the American TractSociety and American Bible Society, comprised the core of nineteenth-century‘evangelical print culture’ – Brown’s term for a loose, non-sectarian coalitionof Protestant activists united by a shared faith in ‘the power of the Word totransform the world’ (2004, 1). The goal of this movement was to inculcatebasic literacy and proliferate an informal canon of texts as overlapping strate-gies to save individuals’ souls, unite Christian believers, and ultimatelyestablish ‘America’ as a sanctified nation, chosen by God, to bring progress tothe world (Brown 2004).4

Roughly a half century before the emergence of the subject ‘English’, theSunday school literature drew an important distinction that later figured prom-inently in English education’s pedagogical literature: it was not knowledge –but a healthy soul – that fostered the comprehensive well-being of individualsand the nation. In 1838, for example, Todd’s The Sunday School Teachercontended that human welfare had never been secured solely by humanreason: ‘Knowledge of the head could be a blessing’, yet knowledge couldalso be a ‘heavy curse’ for individuals and entire nations – depending on theuse to which it was applied (1838, 8–9). Instead, for Fitch, ‘It was God’s gracein the heart that would render the knowledge of the head a blessing’ (1840, 9);thus, Todd called for Sunday school teachers to intervene upon people’s heartsand minds in order to save their souls, rear a Christian population, and reversewhat many Christians viewed as America’s cultural and spiritual decline:

The heart must be educated, as well as the mind … We have abundant proof thatthe well-being of an individual, like that of a people, is nowise secured byextraordinary intellectual powers or very refined civilization. The true happinessof an individual, as a people, is founded in strict morality, self-government,humility, and moderation; on the willing performance of all duties to God, one’ssuperiors, and one’s neighbors. (1838, 11)

This line of reasoning also undergirded the Sunday school’s critique ofsermons and other ‘direct’ approaches to moral, ethical, and social formation– a critique that would also figure in English’s pedagogical literature. Accord-ing to Fitch, sermons generally neglected children’s ‘actual virtues and vices’and employed ‘artificial’ language and ‘bookish’ illustrations that ‘shot abovechildren’s heads and betrayed a want of familiarity with the real lives whichchildren led’ (Fitch 1840, 42). In contrast to these ‘direct’ and primarily logi-cal approaches, the Sunday school literature emphasised ‘indirect’ approachesto personal and collective (trans)formation that were mediated by (1) thesenses and imagination, (2) a ‘sympathetic’ teacher persona, and (3) storiesand metaphors. These mediums not only fostered conditions in which teacherscould govern young people’s hearts and minds, but those in which individualswould align their own lives with spiritual Truths and norms of conduct.


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We can see these three approaches in Fitch’s (1840) The Art of SecuringAttention in a Sunday School Class. First, Sunday school teachers were calledto foster individual and collective transformation by working indirectlythrough young people’s senses and the imagination:

no appeals to reason or conscience, and the feelings of [children], will be soeffective as they might be unless we can also appeal to [their] imagination.Need I remind you how … the Bible writers, and especially the Great Teacherhimself, condescended to the weakness of man [sic]… and addressed theirteachings not to the understanding directly but indirectly through the senses andthe imagination. (1840, 24–5)

This quote also pointed to a second distinctive element of nineteenth-centurySunday school pedagogy that has been linked to English education – thepastoral teacher who ‘condescended’ to children’s ‘natures’ and cultivated‘sympathy’ with the young. In contrast to day-school teachers who tended togovern children ‘by fear’, Fitch wrote that Sunday school teachers ‘must notsecure students’ attention or compliance by threats, overt authority, promises,or any external means’ (1840, 39). Rather, ‘all true success in teaching’ wascontingent upon teachers’ abilities to

possess that sympathy which feels with children … to make due allowance fortheir imperfectly developed nature … comprehend their characters and wants… cultivate an intimate acquaintance with childhood … and sympathize withevery form of childish weakness, except sin. (1840, 63–4)

Finally, Fitch emphasised the transformative power of stories, metaphors, andother aesthetic texts. According to Fitch, if teachers approached moral, ethical,and social lessons directly, children might fancy they were ‘preaching’ andwould be indisposed to listen. Instead,

the most effective lessons which enter the human heart are not those which takethe form of lessons. It is when we are least conscious of the process by whichwe are impressed that we are impressed most deeply. And it is for this reason …that the indirect teaching which is wrapped up in stories and metaphors oftensecures more attention than teaching of a more direct and didactic kind. (1840,53–5)

According to Fitch (1840), stories, parables, and metaphors were pedagogi-cally important in at least three respects. First, literary discipline could‘impress more deeply’ upon young people’s souls and minds if they were notconscious of being disciplined, or disciplining themselves. Second, the moresensual and imaginative appeals of art could work through the senses,emotions, and sympathies to awaken, nurture, and discipline the ‘deepest’aspect of subjectivity – the heart, or soul – which governed people’s thoughts,aims, and conduct. Finally, Fitch wrote, the ‘peculiar force and value’ of



stories, parables, and metaphors was rooted in their ‘pictorial power’ – that is,stories and metaphors ordered experience in a way that helped young people‘see’ doctrines, principles, deep lessons, and spiritual truths which they mightotherwise not have perceived (1840, 25). Thus, the key to this literary regimenwas not teaching lessons directly, but establishing a formative environment inwhich youth ‘gained a certain satisfaction from, and investment in’ readingnarrative and figurative texts, deciphering the moral or social lessons in them,and then applying those lessons to their own lives. In short, the senses, imag-ination, ‘sympathetic’ persona, stories, and metaphors were importantelements that Sunday school teachers could employ to help young people ‘see’their own lives in relation to Christian truth, receive God’s grace, experiencecommunion with the lives of Christian saints, and align their lives with thework of the Holy Spirit.

Chubb’s (1902) literary pedagogy: historical continuities?In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Corson (1896) and Chubb(1902) made similar distinctions in framing English as a pedagogicallydistinctive means of fostering individual and collective well-being. EchoingTodd’s (1838) The Sunday School Teacher, for example, Corson’s (1896) TheAims of Literary Study argued that literary education should follow thehistorical lead of Christian missions and pastoral care. Christianity had notestablished itself by appealing primarily to people’s intellects, Corson wrote,nor had its efforts to convert the world centred on enforcing religious laws,creeds, catechisms, or commandments. Instead of forcing ‘the letter’ of theol-ogy, Christianity had primarily established itself through a ‘succession ofsanctified spirits’ – that is, by working upon and through individuals’ spirits,or souls:

When Christ said ‘follow me,’ He addressed the ‘what is’ in human nature tofollow Him – not from an intellectual apprehension of principles – but throughdeep sympathy, through the awakening, vitalizing, actuating power of incarnateTruth; through a response of your spiritual nature to mine … your essential lifewill be brought into harmony with, and carried along by, the spiritual forces ofthe world. (Corson 1896, 16–17)

Mixing elements from scripture, Christian missions, and Romanticism,Corson wrote that the aim of literary education was to awaken, nurture, anddiscipline people’s ‘deepest’ sympathies and most ‘essential’ natures – theirspirits – to bring them into harmony with the actuating power of Truth and thespiritual forces of the world. Thus, Corson wrote, ‘direct attempts to rectify oradjust people’s lives must be more or less failures … [because they] ignore thedetermining power back of the intellect’ (1896, 14) – instead, literary educa-tion must ‘induce soul states … to attune the inward forces to idealized formsof nature and of human life produced of art’ (1896, 82).


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Likewise, Chubb (1902) posited that English pedagogy needed to construct‘pathways to the heart’ by approaching literature as art, not knowledge. Here,Chubb’s distinction between teaching English ‘as art’ and ‘as knowledge’more or less recycled the Sunday school’s critique of didactics. In Chubb’swords, English teachers who leaned towards ‘preachy’ approaches or treated‘Literature as they would the Ten Commandments’ failed to recognise that thetransformative power of art ‘was silent and subtle, reaching the reason throughthe emotions; affecting profoundly and unconsciously the child’s moods andtemper [and] way of looking at, and feeling about, things’ (1902, 379).

In short, the key to determining young people’s characters was not incul-cating knowledge, but shaping how young people understood, imagined, feltabout, and ‘saw’ themselves and the world. Thus, Chubb reasoned, the mostpowerful discipline was not exercised through didactics or overt force, butthrough English teachers’ ‘personality and through the characters and actionswhich are brought, through picture and song, before the mind’s eye of the child’(1902, 33). Here, Chubb also privileged three elements that were centralelements in Fitch’s (1840) arts of Sunday school teaching. Firstly, Englishpedagogy needed to work upon and through the ‘springs of character’ – thatis, people’s ‘loves and hates … tastes and desires … ideals and aspirations –the life of which depend[ed] upon the light and the perspective with which theyha[d] been invested by the imagination’ (1840, 378). Here, Chubb’s emphasison the ‘imagination’ marked an important point of continuity with the Sundayschool literature – as did his description of the English teachers’ own person-ality as a potent instrument of moral and social training. Secondly, echoingSunday school pedagogues like Fitch (1840), Chubb wrote that English teach-ers’ interactions with young people needed to be ‘touched by something of aspirit of austerity’ (1902, 318) and help them cultivate ‘imaginative sympathy’with children – ‘the power to take children’s point of view in the sphere of imag-ination, fancy, illusion, make-believe; to be myth-maker, fetish-worshipper,idolater, play-actor with them’ (1902, 361). Finally, Chubb’s English pedagogyalso privileged the teaching of art, especially literary art:

those musical and imaginative products which lodge more memorably andfatally in the hearts and minds of children than anything else, and determinetheir life-long habits of seeing and feeling … and, more than their power ofthought and of knowledge, control their being. (1902, 29)

Importantly, this literary regime did not seek to determine and control youngpeople’s lives by intervening upon their minds, but their souls, or ways ofseeing, feeling, and being. According to Chubb, ‘our souls, ourselves, areforever imitating what we see and hear, the forms, the sounds which haunt ourmemories and imaginations’ (1902, 33). Thus, English teachers could contendfor young people’s souls and minds by selecting aesthetic and imaginativetexts that ‘embodied and created ideals that might cast their imaginative spellupon a child’ and then approaching literary plots and characters in ways that



‘provoked admiration and longing … and set up the imitative tendencies thatcarried us into action’ (1902, 380).

Importantly, then, the pedagogical writing of both Corson and Chubbemphasised an ‘indirect’ regime of literary discipline and nurture that aimedto attune young people’s souls – their ways of knowing, feeling, seeing, acting,and being – with ‘larger’ ideals, truths, and forces. In short, this regime calledfor English teachers to govern young people’s lives by developing and shapingyouths’ capacities to know and govern themselves.

Extending and transforming a pastoral projectGiven these points of historical continuity, we can begin to think of modernEnglish teaching as an extension of pastoral pedagogies that date back to nine-teenth-century Protestantism (Hunter 1988) – if not much older disciplines ofspiritual formation (Hamilton 1990; Popkewitz 1991; Patterson 2000a, 2000b;McNeil 1977). Importantly, however, pedagogical discourses of the late nine-teenth and early twentieth century also indexed, and helped accomplish animportant extension and transformation of pastoral care. Whereas the Sundayschool movement had sought its truth in scripture and God’s grace, pedagog-ical discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century combinedChristian views of salvation with a ‘scientific’ disposition towards truth andgovernance (Popkewitz 1997). In this context, ‘science’ was joined with reli-gion and philosophy to legitimate and guide the work of curriculum and peda-gogy by identifying the psycho-social processes in which individuals coulddevelop particular attributes, skills, and sensibilities associated with particularspheres of early twentieth-century life (see also Popkewitz 1991, 1998, 2002).For Chubb, the linking of social science and English teaching constituted animportant and decisive break in the history of education:

For the first time in the history of education, the work of teaching English isbeing organized with something like scientific foresight and method. Anunprecedented activity and enthusiasm in the pursuit of this aim are strikinglymanifest. There is a bewildering output of educational textbooks … educationaljournals … [and] reports of new methods and experiments. (1902, 1–2)

Chubb’s writing at the turn of the century suggests that techniques for the cureof souls were being linked for the first time with new forms of social investi-gation and administration, whose object was the health, security, enlighten-ment, and productivity of individuals and the population (Hunter 1988;Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991). The invention of modern social sciencewas integral to this regime in the sense that science constituted an expertknowledge of young people’s ‘natures’ and an expertise in aligning individu-als’ ‘souls’ and inner ‘mentalities’ with larger governing patterns in society(Donald 1992; Rose 1999). Thus, emergent accounts of English not onlyaimed to attune young people’s souls and minds to Christian truth, but to


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governmental objectives such as socialising immigrants, forging national andracial solidarity, developing a productive workforce and active citizenry, andassuaging a range of popular fears and moral panics associated with crime,intemperance, pauperism, disease, social unrest, and the perceived decline ofreligion (Brass 2009; Popkewitz 1994). In this sense, the emergence of Englishin the USA overlapped in important ways with the emergence of English inEngland, Australia, and Canada (Hunter 1988; Ball, Kenny, and Gardiner1990; Morgan 1990; Peel, Patterson, and Gerlach 2000; Green, Cormack, andReid 2000; Green and Cormack 2008).

These new aims and networks of relations came together in Chubb’s notionof English as a ‘double-preparation’. By double preparation, Chubb meant thatEnglish teachers’ work should be governed by two sets of objectives: (1) ‘thecharacteristics, needs, and interests of the adolescent period’ and (2) the ‘voca-tional and social demands made upon High School education’ (1902, 240).The overarching aims of this project were to aid in young people’s ‘prepara-tion for modern social and personal life – that is, for manhood, womanhood,and citizenship’ – and shape their capacities ‘to meet the actual demands oflife and a specific kind of social environment’ (1902, 241). Within the frame-work of English’s double preparation, new technologies of social science andsocial administration worked to link young people’s inner ‘souls’ and ‘mental-ities’ with larger governing patterns in society.

For example, psychology was brought into English education to restructurehow ‘adolescents’ were seen, defined, evaluated, and acted upon – and tolegitimate and guide teachers’ choices, and uses of literary texts. Whereas theSunday school literature had sanctioned a Biblical knowledge of children andpedagogy, Chubb was clear that high school English teachers ‘must be conver-sant with the psychological phenomena of adolescence’ and also know more‘psychology, child-study, Herbartian lore, and the obstetrics of pedagogy codi-fied in educational journals’ (1902, 361). In particular, Chubb (1902) empha-sised the pedagogical relevance of the psychology of Granville Stanley Hall.Through practices of population reasoning, surveys, experiments, child study,and statistical correlation, Hall and other psychologists of the late nineteenthand early twentieth century had defined and enumerated various regularities of‘the adolescent period’ in terms of (statistically) ‘normal’ stages of (physio-logical, emotional, rational, moral) ‘development’, (a)typical patterns of soci-ality (e.g. interests, hobbies, timing of religious conversion experiences), andcorrelations that linked patterns in youths’ (ab)normality to the incidence ofcrime, vice, and other forms of deviance. For Chubb (1902), this new, ‘scien-tific’ expertise enabled teachers to recognise and capitalise upon the ‘rare andpeculiar opportunities’ of teaching youth in adolescence – in the words of Halland Chubb, the ‘golden age’ that disproportionately ‘determined the set of thecharacter’ and offered the ‘chief moment’ when important lessons would beeither welcomed, or excluded forever, from a permanent ‘home in the soul’(Chubb 1902, 236). It was also reasoned that a psychological knowledge of



adolescents’ ‘natures’ could guide English teachers’ selection of, andapproaches to texts in order to govern adolescents’ development of properindividuality and sociality. For example, Chubb explained how psychologicaland statistical expertise could legitimate and guide English teachers’ efforts toshape adolescents’ sexual, ethical, and spiritual development

by [selecting] literature … that presented formative and healthy types ofmanhood and womanhood … and provided food and outlet for the religious andethical instincts that mature during what is preeminently the period of ‘conver-sions’ as the psychologists tell us … and feed that feeling for Nature which onestatistician records as the most universal emotions of youth. (1902, 243, italicsmine)

Chubb (1902) also argued that English pedagogy should be governed by asecond sphere of requirements – the vocational, social, and civic demandsmade upon the high school. Importantly, social science played an importantrole here in linking English to interests that were (and are) governmental andsocial-administrative (Donald 1992; Green and Reid 2002). To address the‘vocational’ concerns of an increasingly industrial economy, for example,English was linked through the social sciences to the ‘social efficiency’ move-ment, which was largely dependent upon practices of accounting, statisticalmodelling, and surveys to display and calculate the needs of the state, espe-cially its patterns of economic needs and opportunities (Kliebard 1995; Laba-ree 1997). A ‘scientific’ knowledge of young people’s ‘natures’ and anempirical knowledge of early twentieth-century economic life could helpEnglish teachers guide youth towards the ‘choice of, and advancementtowards, a vocation’ and help the English curriculum ‘dovetail into the higherinstitutions of learning and craftsmanship, academic, and professional’(Chubb 1902, 241).

Finally, the course in English was governed by often overlapping teleolo-gies of national and racial progress – in Chubb’s words, ‘the rise of a new typeof national culture’ (1902, 4). Chubb viewed the teaching of ‘English’language and literature as an important means to help young people form anemotional attachment to ‘America’ and self-identify with the progress of thenation and race. At the same time, the course in English also aimed to fostersympathetic identification with America’s ‘ancestral’ links with England, the‘Teutonic’ race, and certain peoples of German, Celt, French, and Norsedescent (Chubb 1902, 4). Here, practices of population reasoning provided theordering principles that structured how adolescents should ‘see’ and tell thetruth about their ‘selves’ and ‘others’. According to Chubb, the work of form-ing youths’ personal, cultural, and civic comportment ‘must not involve anyrepression of individuality’, but incline young people voluntarily to take up the‘point of view of the race … the age … and the outlook of civilization and itsneeds’ (1902, 318–9). By inculcating particular ways of seeing and being,Chubb reasoned, the teaching of ‘English’ literature and ‘the mother tongue’


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constituted a ‘splendid animating and elevating impulse’ that could be used to‘humanize’ the young, define and inculcate a distinctive ‘American’ identity,‘refine’ young people’s tastes and manners, foster ‘patriotic citizenship’, and‘elevate’ the character of individuals, the nation, and the race (1902, 6–7).

Revisiting Chubb’s text is important in at least two respects. First, Chubb(1902) located the inception of English’s ‘larger’ project at the historical inter-section of pastoral Christianity, social science, and the governmental objec-tives of the modern welfare state (see also Hunter 1988; Donald 1992).5 Thistransformation exemplified the linkage that Foucault (1979) has calledgovernmentality – the linking of larger governing patterns of society with theinner ‘souls’ and ‘mentalities’ of the individual (Popkewtiz 1997; Dean 1999).Second, one can also recognise how science, especially psychology, hadbegun to supplement, if not supplant theology and philosophy in educationalreform (Popkewitz 1991) and the cure of souls (McNeil 1977; Holifield 1983).As Nikolas Rose has noted, scientific expertise was integrated into socialwelfare institutions (including education) near the turn of the twentiethcentury as technologies to align people’s ‘souls’ with sociopolitical objectivesand institutional goals:

In the complex webs they have traced out, the truths of science and the power ofexperts act as relays that bring the values of authorities and the goals ofbusiness into contact with the dreams and actions of us all. These technologiesfor the government of the soul … align political, social, and institutional goalswith individual pleasures … desires … happiness, and fulfillment of the self.(1999, 261)

Rose’s (1999) notion of ‘governing the soul’ not only captures the place ofscientific expertise in practices of governmentality, but also emphasises the‘depth’ of modern disciplinary practices. As Fendler (2001) has noted, writerslike Rose (1999) and Foucault (1977, 1990) retained the use of the term ‘soul’to illustrate how modern exercises of power increasingly aimed to workthrough what was previously held to be the ‘innermost’ and most sacrosanctaspects of humanity. Contemporary pedagogy no longer uses the term ‘soul’.Nevertheless, as I will show next, accounts of English teaching in the earlytwenty-first century have also sought to align the ‘innermost’ aspects ofsubjectivity with a range of sociopolitical objectives.

Governing the twenty-first-century soul: ‘The State of English Education and a Vision of its Future’To highlight the persistent presence of history in contemporary educationaldiscourse (Green and Cormack 2008), I now return in more detail to thecontemporary position paper I quoted at the beginning of this paper, ‘The Stateof English Education and a Vision of its Future: A Call to Arms’ (Alsup et al.2006). As I noted previously, this US position paper has adopted a rhetorical



framework and pedagogical ‘vision’ that were also prominent in Englisheducation’s first professional texts – and before that, in the Sunday schoolmovement. Reinscribing a now familiar set of distinctions, Alsup et al. (2006)posit that literary education is not primarily a matter of transmitting facts orcultural capital, nor is it primarily a matter of teaching people to read andwrite. Rather, English is distinctive in the sense that it seeks to contribute tothe comprehensive (personal, cultural, social, economic, and civic) health ofindividuals and the nation. Within this formulation, English pedagogy serves‘larger’ ends by structuring how individuals and society define, understand,and act upon themselves:

English education, more than any other academic discipline, because of itsfocus on language and representation, contributes vitally to the process bywhich our society defines, understands, maintains, and transforms itself. (Alsupet al. 2006, 279–80, italics in original)

This account does not call for English to discipline young people through overtforce or ‘direct’ imposition, but through ordering the symbolic system thatconstructs the ‘truth’ about one’s self, others, and the world (Morgan 1990;Green 1993). Thus, one can recognise important historical continuities that linkthis position paper to the pedagogical literatures of both the nineteenth-centurySunday school and turn-of-the-twentieth-century English education. First,contemporary English teachers, like their historical forebears, must see to it that‘values ought to bear some recoverable relationship to real lives and situations’(Alsup et al. 2006, 291). In addition, contemporary English pedagogy also needsto work through the medium of the imagination: ‘The power of the imaginationconstitutes a fundamental venue within which English teachers work. Thus, wemust jealously ferret out and guard distinctions among competing versions of“truth” [and] help students understand the ethical burden of doing so’ (Alsupet al. 2006, 291). Finally, this regime privileges the teaching of literature sothat young people can ‘find others who feel and think like ourselves and equallyto experience others who enlarge our sense of the diverse ways in which it ispossible to be human’ (Alsup et al. 2006, 283). Like Fitch in 1840 and Chubbin 1902, Alsup et al. also emphasise the power of metaphors and narratives toshape how young people understand their selves, others, and the world:

Underlying our power and pleasure in the personal world … stand the twinmiracles, metaphors and narrative – the first, combining and contrasting to helpus see new possibilities and perspectives; the second chronicling and thematiz-ing to help us discover and locate meaning and continuity in our otherwise tran-sitory existence. (2006, 283)

My analysis suggests striking similarities between nineteenth-century evan-gelicals’ accounts of ‘using the Word to transform the world’ (Brown 2004)and the ways that English teachers, past and present, have employed literary


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and popular texts in the construction of students as subjects. Pedagogicalapproaches that were developed in the nineteenth century to convert youngpeople to Christianity and care for their souls have now been adapted towardsmore secular forms of pastoral care in English classrooms (Morgan 1998).Most notably, one can see how much of what now counts as ‘progressive’,‘critical’, and ‘cultural studies’ approaches to English teaching have largelyrehabilitated nineteenth-century pedagogical arguments and distinctions andredirected them towards different notions of progress, sociopolitical ideals,and visions of personal and collective welfare (Hunter 1988; Morgan 1990;Patterson 2000a, 2000b; Brass 2010).

In the early twenty-first century, these pedagogical techniques haveremained linked to practices of scientific inquiry and social administration –as they were in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One can recognisethese points of continuity by comparing Chubb’s (1902) ‘double-preparation’and Alsup et al.’s (2006) linking of English education to ‘six worlds’. WhereasChubb (1902) embraced scientific expertise as a means to prepare young people‘for personal and social life … citizenship … a vocation … and higher insti-tutions of learning’, the CEE has called for the teaching of English to inculcatethe processes and skills required of six intertwined worlds of early twenty-firstcentury life:

To become fully literate requires writing and reading in the six intertwinedworlds that we now inhabit: the personal, the cultural, the educational andprofessional, the economic, the civic, and the cyber. Each of these requires itsown set of processes and skills, and attaining them represents a highly demand-ing educational goal. (Alsup et al. 2006, 283–4)

This excerpt suggests that Alsup et al. (2006) have linked English educationto a set of functions that were central to its emergence around the turn of thetwentieth century – not only the inculcation of literacy, but the formation ofpersonal subjectivity, the public citizen, and national imaginaries (Morgan1990; Cormack 2003). Within these pedagogical frameworks, English hasbeen, and remains a training in how to say ‘I’ (Morgan 1990) as well as ameans of inculcating (personal, cultural, educational and professional,economic, civic, and cyber) attributes at the scale of entire populations (Peel,Patterson, and Gerlach 2000). Thus, as scholars like Ian Hunter and AnnetttePatterson have argued, English can still be seen as ‘the territory of disciplineand governmentality, of bio-power, and the social regulation of norms andimages, with the English teacher as the kindly moral supervisor of futurecitizens’ (Green, Cormack, and Reid 2000, 114).

At the same time, it is important to recognise how Alsup et al. (2006) haveconnected subjectivity to both continuous and discontinuous forms of disci-pline, power, and expertise. First, Alsup et al. (2006) have not only sought tofit young people into the existing social, economic, civic, and global order(like Chubb), but also foster their capacities to be ‘critical’ about particular



aspects of early twenty-first century life. In twenty-first-century English class-rooms, the CEE argues, young people are to be ‘sophisticated, even waryconsumers that … cast a skeptical eye on a culture madly intent on persuadingus to purchase an endless array of disposal commodities’ (Alsup et al. 2006,283). As citizens, they are ‘not only to become informed voters but also ques-tion … elected leaders … participate in committees, parties, and movements… and foster social change and build more equitable and peaceful communi-ties’ (Alsup et al. 2006, 284). Similarly, the teaching of English language andliterature remains linked to the formation of citizens as well as personal, racial,and national identities; at the same time, today’s teachers and students ofEnglish should not find the truth about their ‘self’ and ‘others’ in terms ofChristian scripture (Todd 1838; Fitch 1840) or the ‘rise of a new nationalculture’ (Chubb 1902), but discourses of multiculturalism, interdisciplinaryinquiry, sociocultural theory, and critical pedagogy. For example, Alsup et al.(2006) argue that today’s youth will only remain ‘parochial … citizens of theworld’ unless they ‘experience the multitude of cultures through their litera-ture, music, dance, and art’ (2006, 283). In addition, English teachers should‘lead young people to … Freirean critical awareness’ in order to help themrecognise ‘a measure of agency to act in and change the world … be criticallyaware of the world around them and … possess a sense of purpose and possi-bility based on a vision of social justice and equality’ (2006, 287).

These excerpts illustrate how the CEE has linked pastoral techniques withacademic inquiry and theory to shape how young people think, feel, desire,act, and ‘see’ themselves, others, and the world. This has important ethical andpolitical implications. First, we can recognise the capacity of English peda-gogy to serve a range of purposes and functions and engender a considerablerange of (personal, social, educational and professional, economic, civic, andcyber) effects (Green and Cormack 2008). Next, we can also recognise howyoung people’s ‘agency’ has not been constituted as a state of absolute free-dom beyond the boundaries of the social, but a capacity to know and governone’s self within particular social rules and forms (Donald 1992). Finally,these historical discontinuities help us recognise how English educationremains implicated in historical struggles to tell the ‘truth’ about the world. AsPopkewitz has noted,

there are multiple claims to truth and progress; progress is never absolute but apragmatic movement that entails both critical and constructive moments. Thislatter awareness involves considering claims about truth and producing socialbetterment as historically bound, contingent, and emerging from the socialstruggles and tensions of a world in which we live. (1994, 9)

Importantly, then, documents like ‘The State of English Education and aVision for its Future: A Call to Arms’ (Alsup et al. 2006) work to align teach-ers’ and students’ lives with historically particular values, social interests, andways of feeling, knowing, and being. Whereas religious, philosophical, and


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scientific truth played constitutive roles in older projects of educational andsocial reform, the CEE has positioned the university intellectual/researcher asthe legitimate and authoritative figure in defining the professional knowledgeof English education, articulating visions of ‘progress’ and ‘social change’,and sanctioning the ‘truth’ about one’s ‘self’ and ‘others’. This marks animportant amplification and shift in the role of research universities andacademic researchers across the past two centuries (Popkewitz 1991, 1994,1997). As the work of Chubb (1902) reminds us, it was a ‘new and unprece-dented’ move around the turn of the twentieth century to link English teachingwith academic expertise and the governmental objectives of the modernwelfare state. In the early twenty-first century, in contrast, this new and previ-ously unprecedented historical linkage has been largely taken-for-granted andextended to not only sanction psychological research, but ‘interdisciplinary’inquiry in English education to guide schools and society towards visions ofprogress, personal and communal fulfilment, and social change:

English educators conduct interdisciplinary inquiry by drawing on English stud-ies, education, the scientific study of human behavior, and related fields. Theytransform theory and research in these fields as a basis for enhancing the under-standing of the teaching and learning of English. (Alsup et al. 2006, 281)

As Popkewitz has noted, the turn to university research and theory in educa-tional reform has placed a good deal of ‘faith’ in reason and academic ratio-nality for actualising the subject and changing the world. Thus, we canrecognise how Alsup et al. (2006) are implicated in a decidedly ‘modern’approach to educational and social reform that has largely assumed andextended key aspects of the Enlightenment project. This is somewhat ironicsince English’s distinctive pedagogy was once framed as a ‘spiritual’ responseto the perpetual failure of human ‘intellect’ and ‘reason’ to improve thecomprehensive welfare of individuals and nations. In the present, however,non-didactic pedagogies now function to align people’s souls and minds withthe truths of human rationality, scientific expertise, and academic theory.Thus, we can recognise how the work of Alsup et al. (2006) is implicated inthe displacement of religion and other, non-academic ways of knowing – andin the complex interweaving of theology, pastoral care, ethics, and other fieldsof learning that began in the last two or three centuries (Holifield 1983).Finally, we can also see how ‘The State of English Education’ (Alsup et al.2006) has functioned to naturalise expert-mediated forms of subjectivity, thefigure of the university intellectual as prophet, and the university’s role insocial, economic, and cultural management.

ConclusionIn the early twenty-first century, English education’s critiques of ‘knowledge’and claims to ‘larger’ aims than other school subjects go more or less without



saying. In this paper, however, I have begun to illustrate how these oftentaken-for-granted accounts of English education have a history – a history thatintersects in important ways with the histories of the cure of souls, the socialsciences, and modern practices of government. While overtly Christian termsmay have dropped out of educational discourses in the early to middle twenti-eth century (Popkewitz 1991), one can recognise how contemporary pedagog-ical distinctions and practices have largely reiterated pedagogical distinctionsand practices that were once central to Christian missions and pastoral care.One can also recognise how English pedagogy has functioned to attunepeople’s subjectivities (or ‘souls’) with particular forms of expertise, sociopo-litical objectives, and larger administrative patterns in society. Thus, Englisheducation has been – and remains – implicated in practices of discipline andgovernmentality, bio-power, and the social regulation of young people’sthoughts, emotions, tastes, desires, imaginations, actions, and ways of ‘seeing’their ‘self’, others, and the world (Green, Cormack, and Reid 2000).

These historical commitments and sociopolitical effects have receivedlittle attention in English’s pedagogical literature. As Robert Morgan hasnoted, the rhetoric of English education scholarship has tended to be ‘pugna-tiously antihistorical’, leaving many educators and scholars largely unawareof the historical commitments of their practice and its sociopolitical effects(1990, 231). However, by exploring strategic conjunctions of pedagogicaltexts through history, we can begin to recognise how signature aspects ofEnglish pedagogy have been linked historically with the cure of souls, shift-ing modes of expertise, and larger struggles over the truths and norms bywhich individuals and society should be known and governed (Foucault1977, 1979; Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991; Dean 1999; Rose 1999).With a better sense of the political historicity of our pedagogical discourses,we can begin to get beyond the field’s largely self-serving terms, unsettlepresent-day categories, and recognise the (un)changing ways in whichEnglish has been implicated in relations of social regulation, cultural produc-tion, and larger struggles over telling the ‘truth’ about one’s self, others, andthe world.

Notes1. This paper has emphasised the pastoral-Christian and social-administrative rever-

berations in English’s pedagogical literature. This is not to suggest that elementaryand secondary English teaching were not influenced by the humanities. Rather,since most people take for granted that the school subject English has been derivedfrom the humanities (Luke 2004), I have opted here to draw attention to Englisheducation’s less recognised links with pastoral Christianity, social science, and thesocial administration of populations (see also Hunter 1988).

2. For unknown reasons, Eaton and Mains printed Fitch’s book with a publicationdate that read ‘184-?’. To avoid this distracting in-text citation, I have cited thisbook as Fitch (1840) in accordance with reference guides; however, the book mayhave been published at another point in the 1840s.


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3. For more on the European Sunday school movement, see Lacquer (1976), whosehistory challenged the established view that the emergence of the EuropeanSunday school movement was closely tied to the Industrial Revolution and thesocial control of the working classes.

4. For more on the place of literacy in nineteenth-century Sunday schools andcommon schools, please see Soltow and Stevens’ (1981) socioeconomic analysisof nineteenth-century literacy campaigns, Kennedy’s (1966) history of Protestanteducation, Nord’s (2004) history of Christian publishing, and Brown’s (2004)history of ‘evangelical print culture’. For more on the complex interweaving ofAmerican exceptionalism and Christian eschatology in nineteenth-century reformmovements, see also Popkewitz (1998), especially his use of Bercovitch’s (1978)‘American Jeremiad’.

5. I do not want to suggest that Chubb’s (1902) pedagogical writing was solelylocated at the discursive intersections of pastoral Christianity, science, and socialadministration – or to suggest that Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ accounts for all ofthe social relations at play here. For example, Chubb also linked this literaryregimen to the work of Plato, European pedagogues like Pestalozzi, and nineteenth-century Romanticism.

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Historicizing English pedagogy: the extension and transformation of 'the cure of souls