Simon Haines shot to prominence for an Op-Ed piece in TheAustralian (9 June 2006) that seemed to enter the lists on the conservative side of the debate about what they teach in English classes these days. If you read carefully, you could tell that the prominence was only going to be momentary, because Haines’s argument was far too nuanced to provoke and maintain the level of polarised hysteria the media appears to expect. He proposed neither a return to basics (‘the education I had was perfect – after all, it produced me – and every secondary student should have exactly what I had’), nor a radical embrace of new media and cleansed thinking. Instead, he questioned whether politics, important though it is, is all there really is in literature or, indeed, in being human. Then he concluded with a challenge rather than a manifesto for English teaching: ‘If literature is politicised too early and too exclusively (I only say “if”), then it may never reveal its true power as political thought.’