Of course this was not Ed's only English paper; he had plenty of opportunity to develop other ‘responses' to works of literature. His papers on Chaucer and Webster, for example, required him to impose a feminist reading on the Merchant's Tale and The Duchess of Malfi, while post-colonialism was covered by Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Brian Friel's Translations. As it happened, Friel's play - which deals explicitly with language and colonisation - brought Ed some relief since, unlike the narrow polemics of the ‘theorists', it is a genuine work of art, concerned with universal human values, including the possibility of reconciliation, and is, as Ed put it, ‘a lot more open-minded than this course.'

It would be comforting to believe that Ed's experiences were unusual, but there is no reason to think this. His exam board, Edexcel, is one of the most popular, and though his English teachers might have chosen different papers, the deeper point is that Edexcel's subordination of literature to ‘theory' fully reflects the founding principles of the National Curriculum in English. As the English Working Group, chaired by Brian Cox, explained back in 1989: ‘The desire for a national culture is seen [by some academics] as damagingly conservative, often ‘racist' and almost invariably unsympathetic to the rights of women... In England the desire for an ‘English' tradition is said to hide a deep fear of our present multi-cultural society.' For this reason, Cox was anxious that all teachers should be aware of ‘the ideological assumptions of their approach', ‘for this is one way to overcome dogmatism.'

If Cox really hoped that the new English curriculum would ‘overcome dogmatism', he must be a disappointed man. For while, in the words of Michele Ledda, one of the author's of the Civitas report, ‘A British pupil can go through the entire school system and get the top marks in English and English Literature without knowing that Spenser, Milton or Pope ever existed', the one thing nobody can avoid in today's exam system, is the dogmatism of ‘theory'. An examining board which was really concerned about this problem, would surely have separated the two elements in Ed's papers. Those who wished it, would then have been free to study English literature, spared, so far as possible, the sterile dogma of ‘post-modern' ideologues; while those who wanted to study the works of Franz Fanon and the New Left could do so, too - presumably as part of a course on Western political thought - subjecting their ideas to analytical scrutiny, rather than treating them as a set of unexamined premises.