ABSTRACT
There has long been in the forefront of English pedagogical theory and practice an influential tendency – perhaps the influential tendency – envisaging the subject as essentially located in an arts paradigm. Within this broad church, including several important commentators from outside mainstream English, many write and practise within an effectively Romantic tradition in English pedagogy, including such notable commentators as Sampson, Holbrook, Rosen and Knight (albeit in their very different ways): a tradition that could be helpfully characterized as combining the most creative, non-instrumental aspects of English teaching and learning (sometimes rather clumsily grouped together under the umbrella titles of ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘personal expression’). To do many of these writers full justice, however, we need also to credit them with a powerful critical edge: to use terms more likely to be encountered in exponents of critical pedagogy, following Paulo Freire, for at their most lucid they combine elements of a ‘language of critique’ with a ‘language of possibility’.
