That this has become an age of criticism is a commonplace. But that the very fact of our critical concern has also produced in the United States a generation of sensitive and, for historical and technical reasons, uniquely competent editors of literary texts is far less generally known. Critical concentration on the verbal subtlety of novelists as well as poets has strengthened the desire to read “clear text.” Attention paid to textual revisions has sharpened critical insight just as regard for the whole effects of whole works has enriched response. The need to know all a writer wrote in order to interpret truly any part of it is once more recognized as essential by the serious critic. New editions of letters and collections of criticism appear. Critics compile bibliographies. Biography and literary history flourish.

Of the many enterprises undertaken during the last few years to upgrade the teaching of English, the 1962 Summer Institute Program sponsored by the Commission on English of the College Entrance Examination Board has been the most dramatic and, in many ways, the most promising. Already it is clear that the effects of this program are being felt in many high-school classes, and that the formula devised by the Commission on English is being copied widely and successfully. The potential usefulness of such Institutes for the advanced training of high-school English teachers, therefore, has already been demonstrated. What makes these Institutes of especial significance to MLA members, however, is that the program required twenty of the most influential Departments of English in the country to involve themselves directly in this advanced training of high-school teachers. These were not institutes conducted by professors of Education with the casual blessing of Departments of English; these were institutes administered and largely taught by professors of English. The difference is a very great one indeed. Whether we like it or not, the CEEB Institutes have, in effect, forced those of us in Departments of English to acknowledge a substantial responsibility for improving the quality of English teaching in the high schools. Because of them—and of such subsequent activities as the Allerton Conference and the Curriculum Centers—a new appraisal of our proper professional functions has been quietly taking place on one campus after another. Even now it is no exaggeration to say, I believe, that a Department of English may no longer claim to be of the top rank unless it includes among its programs one or more designed to aid the high-school English teacher, both the tenderfoot and the old-timer.

The British Council conference on the teaching of English Literature overseas was held at King's College, Cambridge, England, 16–18 July 1962. As K. R. Johnstone, Deputy Director-General of the British Council, pointed out, this was the first conference on teaching English Literature overseas, though such teaching has been in progress for over a century. More than seventy-five participants came from twenty-five different countries, and had taught in many more. The discussions of the conference were taped and will be published in a 60,000 word book by the firm of Methuen.

It is with considerable pleasure that I meet with you today to discuss the mutual efforts of the community of English scholars, teachers of English and the Office of Education in the enterprise which we have come to call Project English. Just one year ago we were in the throes of attempting to organize this joint effort. As many of you know, this was a period of considerable casting about to determine the directions and magnitude of our effort in this area.

This will be a brief, factual, uncolored, and dull account of the first year of Project English. To understand the first year, however, we should go back a little further.

Jerome K. Bruner, the distinguished psychologist from Harvard who may presently be influencing American education more deeply than any other individual, recently asserted that this country is embarked on a permanent revolution in education based on a broad redefinition of the nature of the educational profession. This revolution in the educational Establishment is symbolized, says Bruner, by the presence of Nobel laureates in physics devoting their talents and energies to the devising of school curricula in science. Underlying the revolution is the assumption that “those who know a subject most deeply know best the great and simple structuring ideas in terms of which instruction must proceed.”