The Dartmouth Seminar is rightly understood as a key event in English curriculum history--indeed, "a pivotal moment," as one commentator put it. Nonetheless questions can still be asked about the nature of its significance, both "discursively," with regard to the discourse (and rhetoric) of post-Dartmouth English teaching, and "historically," with regard to English curriculum history. Proposing that Dartmouth be seen as a text, this paper explores issues of language, representation, knowledge, power and history, focusing on what seems to have been forgotten or at least overlooked in subsequent accounts of Dartmouth and the "Growth" paradigm in English curriculum studies. To what extent has a "received" history been allowed to obscure and obstruct potentially more productive discourse on rethinking the subject? What does all this mean for thinking historically about English teaching?