SysEd and English: The Work of Literature in an Over-Systematised Enlightenment

Abstract

ABSTRACT This is a theoretical essay that seeks to be of value to English teachers who want to understand their oft-reported experience of feeling stuck in an over-systematised professional environment. The premise is that if one can understand the abstract nature of systems, and then of over-systematisation and its impacts, one can more readily read the specific details of one’s context and take informed steps to resist or lessen over-systematisation as locally experienced. The essay takes as its starting point Clifford Siskin’s thesis of the rise of system as essential to the Enlightenment and thus western modernity and understands the excessive proliferation of system within education (‘SysEd’) as a phenomenon closely related to neoliberalism. The discussion draws on Bernard Stiegler’s antithetical pairing of stupidity and knowledge, and Thomas J. Sergiovanni’s pragmatic sense of ‘lifeworld’ and ‘systemsworld’ in schools. The concluding claim – drawing on Peter Medway’s account of subject English’s disciplinary distinctiveness and its attunement to core Enlightenment values – is that English offers the best disciplinary mode we have for resisting and ameliorating the negative effects of SysEd.