Reflections on “What is the Nature of English Education?”.

“What is the Nature of English Education?” is a bold article, one not afraid to make pronouncements, sometimes controversial, about the pedagogical weaknesses of scientific behaviorism; the centrality of language as process and product in the English classroom; the potential instructional benefits of viewing English education as a humanity and the teaching of English as an art; the essentiality of the teacher’s Being to the quality of instruction; the plentitude of small-scale, nonaccumulative research in English education; the need for an encompassing philosophy to unite English and education. As I read the article, I was prompted now and then into reverie, the consequence of having survived thirty-five years of “movements” in English education, all of which Mr. Henry touches upon: the Basic Issues Conferences, which spawned as the cardinal issue, “What is English?”, a query to which some still await a reply; Project English, which through materials developed at various centers gave promise of establishing an intrinsic structure in literature, if not in the teaching of English; the Anglo-American Conference at Dartmouth, Anglo participants to which averred that even if there were an intrinsic structure to English, which is moot, such a structure had nothing to do with the psycholinguistic development of children end of movement; behavioral objectives, for which, as Mr. Henry points out, teachers were coerced into writing thousands of trivial objectives, led by supervisors who declared, “If we don’t do it, someone else will”; the triple revolution in grammar, from Latinate-based to structural linguistics to stratificational/generative grammar back to Latinate, with the consequence that many of us were left with unexercised esoteric vocabularies.