No common ground: Kingman, grammar and the nation

Abstract A Committee of Inquiry into ‘the Teaching of English Language’ was set up by the U.K. Secretary of State for Education in 1987 to report on how the English language should be taught in schools. This paper focuses on the Kingman Report as a key ideological text about the state of the English language and its relation to the state of the Nation. The aim is to place Kingman in historical and political context, not only as part of a large scale, politically motivated reorganisation of the English education system, but also within a longer tradition of discussion relating language to questions of national identity and culture. The paper examines the symbolic weight of ‘grammar’ in the Report, and the underlying nationalist ‘land and language’ stance in educational discussion which makes some provision for the Welsh language possible within Wales, but which denies educational recognition for minority languages within England. Drawing on historical sources, it traces the use of the concept of Standard English, to reveal a continuity in thinking behind the underlying authoritarian impulse to unity in culture, which represses recognition not only of the existence of linguistic variation, but also of social divisions.