The End of English

The End of English

Summary: Accountability lays the ideological groundwork for a challenge to the Humanist purposes of an education in English. Through its emphasis on measurement, testing, and information, it has transformed the value of English into data. The first stage in this transformation was the introduction of “standards” in the corporate model of the International Standards Organization (ISO) - statements of measurable results for each course of study. A natural concomitant was the creation of the Education Quality and Accountability Office and its regimen of testing to measure school achievement against these standards. Further progress in the diminution of English came as the new education corporation used tests to re-define literacy as a narrow band of skills and strategies, and supported it with enormous funding and resources. English teachers surrendered the term. During the period of reform in Ontario, our subject association, the Ontario Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts, collapsed, and the pressures of reform on local and provincial budgets also determined a huge loss in leadership positions for English across the province. There is an urgent need for us to revive democratic discussion of this new state of our subject, to re-assert our collective voice, and to reclaim the term “literacy” to mean competence in language that is inseparable from the construction of personal and cultural understanding.