ABSTRACT
A century after the publication of The Newbolt Report—as The New Newbolt makes clear—English continues to be a site for debate and even conflict. The subject continues to face demands from a varied and evolving corpus of ideological, political and social impulses. When we set these demands alongside a tendency over recent years to diminish the role of the arts and creativity—with their concomitant individual and corporate advantages—both within education and within society more broadly, the case for re-evaluating the findings and recommendations of The Newbolt Report becomes evident. Perhaps the most obvious of the connections between Newbolt's time and our own lie in his Committee's awareness of the threat—a threat all too evident in the classroom of the twenty-first century—‘that a true instinct for humanism may be smothered by the demand for measurable results, especially the passing of examinations in a variety of subjects …’ (Newbolt 1921: 56).
