The paper takes as its starting point the relationship between the "New English", a curriculum movement commonly associated with the 1960s and 1970s, and the New Education, an influential general educational reform movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It inquires into the discursive-ideological (dis)continuities between these two moments in educational history, with a view to positing that developments and debates in English teaching always need to be understood historically, within the larger context of the history of education and schooling and the politics of nation and empire. Its immediate reference-points being Britain and Australia, but with implications more broadly for the curriculum history of post-Imperial, Anglophone countries more generally as well as the history of educational ideas, the paper seeks to explore why it was that "English" was installed at the heart of the modern(ist) school curriculum. (Contains 4 notes.)