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 that is v

  Oscar Wilde: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors’ I was having a discussion with a student not long ago, about a novel and its main character, and how that character – a boy –   changes throughout the narrative. At some point, she exclaimed: ‘Ah, I see, this character has grown – he has developed!’. No, I said, it doesn’t pay to think that way. Instead, you should think: ‘That person has changed, that person has developed’- he’s not a character, he’s not made of cardboard or balsa wood, he’s not a Platonic shadow: he’s real, he lives and breathes like you and me. He’s alive . This idea that a made-up character, in a made-up situation, with made-up parents and friends and occupations, could be real, seems at first illogical. ‘No’ you say, he’s not real: he’s an invention, he’s got no blood in his made-up veins, no feelings in his made-up body and mind – he’s a character in a book of fiction, and as such he cannot exist for himself. His world is th