The write kind of knowledge in English

Something very odd is happening to school English. There has been a subtle imperceptible shift whereby what was once the lifeblood of the subject is in danger of being drained from it leaving it devoid of the spirit it once contained. What is bleeding out of English, for want of a better way of describing it, is that connection, however loose, between art and life – a kind of harnessing of the imagination through words to create meaning. How precisely this manifested itself in a body of knowledge to be taught is quite hard to describe. Indeed, the nature of that corpus is more evident in its absence from lessons than in any exact definition of what knowledge in school English actually used to constitute. In other words, it is only clear what was there – this curious interplay between language, life and the imagination – once it went missing.