On Literature and Teaching

  ‘Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous’ (attributed to Confucius)  There is an on-going debate in the Netherlands about the place to be given to citizenship education – Burgerschapsonderwijs in Dutch. Citizenship ( burgerschap ) is in fact a required part of secondary schools’ curriculum; that is, all schools are legally required to teach it. Since teaching something necessitates first defining that something, the problem starts with a simple question: what does one mean with Citizenship and citizenship education? While at first it may seem redundant to ask that question (after all, don’t we all know what being a citizen means?), it quickly becomes clear that it isn’t, as it turns out we don’t all agree on what citizenship means, nor what teaching citizenship entails. I’m not exactly interested in tracing back the history of that subject, so suffice it to say that so far, one camp has dominated the Dutch discussion – something ...

[This follows on from last week's blog - the first two points were 'Don't focus on the wrong thing', and 'All fiction is metaphorical'] C] All fiction is true to life Seen in the light of point B. ( All fiction is metaphorical ), that would seem counter-intuitive: how can something be both metaphorical and true to life? Isn’t the clue in the word ‘Fiction’? That is a discussion we can leave to theorists (even though it pays to remember the parallels between the usual chronologies of narratives and life); what matters most to us is that all fiction comes from life, and all fiction therefore reflects life. It doesn’t mean that all events, characters and the rest are true, that they exist in the world as themselves. Yet they do, in many ways, because fiction is the product of a mind at a certain time – a person, basically – and so their thinking is necessarily constrained by being in the world at a certain time . It follows that everything in fiction will b...