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What is English?

English is about meaning: what language means, how and why; what literature means, how, why, and with what impact.  To be more formal, here’s the key passage from the 2023 Quality Assurance Agency Subject Benchmark Statement for English (it’s for Higher Education but works for English across all stages):

Students of English study meaning through communication in the medium of English and related languages, and develop their understanding through creative, critical and analytical responses. 

The key word for me here is meaning. 

Here’s why.

We – each member of our species - are both a ‘who’ and a ‘what’.  The ‘what’ is the world we inhabit, from its most obvious physical laws to the most abstract truths of mathematics, with the technologies that shape our lives. Even our bodies can seem like a ‘what’ (when, for example, we stub our toe). The ‘what’ has wonderful and exciting academic disciplines: science, technology, engineering, maths, medicine. 

But we also are a ‘who’. ‘Who’ we are, as individuals, as societies, is not revealed through the ‘what’ (to a doctor, your broken toe is just a broken toe; on a map, your home is just a building). Instead, the meaning of ‘who’ is brought to light through language, because language is where meaning is made. To think about ‘who’ you or we are, and how we should live, means to explore that the process and results of that meaning-making: stories and histories, poems, plays, novels, games, media and language itself.

What does this mean for what English is?

 It means that the humanities, and English most of all, is a dialogue between texts, teachers and students, moderated through the subject itself. As a dialogue, EnglishÌýshould include our thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes – we ourselves are the laboratories of English – the subject should be unpredictable in process and in product.

It means English is about dissensus: in a science class everyone’s answer, everyone’s experiment should end up with the same result, but in English, we know we’ve had a good class when we disagree and come to understand why and how we disagree.

What is English for? 

This is a bit like asking: what is language and literature for? The answers to this are many and varied: entertainment, enjoyment, wisdom, communication with others and with yourself, both an escape from and a return to the world (think about how a story can make you see something differently); for being human – after all we are the ‘animal who uses language’. So English is for all this, for enjoyment, for being… ourselves. This is one reason why it is so hard to define.  It also means that English isn’t just a subject in education: it is a subject for education (which is why so many English teachers care about education in general).

More concretely, English teaches core overlapping capabilities for life and work.

• Communication, which begins as clarity of thought and expression and grows to argument, persuasion, understanding an audience, performance, digital literacy
• Collaboration, teamwork, paying attention to others, listening, responding
• Critical thinking, the ability to process, digest, evaluate and manipulate complex material (what is a novel, say, if not, at least, ‘complex material’?)
• Creativity in writing and reading, in thinking around issues and questions, what the market calls entrepreneurship.

One recent report calls all this Storycraft: these are vital skills particularly valued in the market and by business leaders. This is why, in contrast to what the media and comedians say, that that English graduates earn as much as others and have successful, fulfilling careers.