Mapping the terrain of schooled English and creative writing

In this chapter, I give reasons for suggesting that schooled English be recentred around writing practices. It is, to extent, a synopsis of the chapters that follow and in which more theoretically detailed analyses are developed. In this chapter, I consider (briefly) the history of English as a schooled subject and its use by governments – from the nineteenth century to the present day – as a mode of aesthetic and civic education. I consider, too, the brief career of A Level Creative Writing in England, discontinued for being overly skills-oriented and insufficiently knowledge-based.