I’m almost allergic to jargon. But the idea of analysing the English curriculum through precursors and successors is incredibly useful. Failing to teach the precursors in any meaningful or systematic way is what I see in most English departments. It is why you could lift the curriculum from one school and drop it on another with no real impact on student progress. Every department thinks its curriculum is special, but very few achieve progress results to suggests this is so.

It comes down to the precursors they fail to teach.

What the hell is a precursor? Read on.