English Teaching: Classics in the Vernacular

In her chapter on progressive theorists in relation to English teaching, Margaret Mathieson emphasises their belief that the classical curriculum and traditional teaching methods were personally destructive, remote from pupils&s; experience and needs, and dehumanising. In the 1980s there is little doubt about the prima facie case for English as a main subject on the school curriculum and no one would have any trouble in producing a list of reasons for its inclusion in any description of core subjects. The decades immediately after the First World War were important in the development of English teaching. Mathieson characterises the interwar period by referring to &s; the national sense of inferiority to Europe in education, the rising demand for secondary school places and the general feeling that reform was necessary&s;. The expanding secondary school sector presented a major area of development for English teaching; this was previously a sector where English was neglected but one which provided a route to higher education.