On Literature and Teaching

Are there books that are good, that are actually very pleasant to read, that have a lot of obvious literary qualities with a solid narrative architecture…and yet that flatter to deceive? Are there novels that, once finished, feel less than what they could – or perhaps should – have been? I first read Jonathan Coe many years ago, with his Dwarves of death (1990), then went back to his first novel, and finally hit the jackpot with what I still think is his best novel, What a carve up! (1994). That last started a sort of series where novels are not necessarily linked except through a family (the Earnshaw), the epitome of everything Coe obviously feels is wrong with England: rich, entitled, greedy capitalists with no regard for others, certainly not for the poor – in a word, for all those who are not like them. Them? Eton-educated, nepotists, exploiters, leeching from the top, sucking the life and money and happiness from those below them, all without the merest sense of morality. All ...

  Resisting cognitive outsourcing with literature Although there has not yet been enough time to know for certain, an increasing number of scientific studies on the effects of GenAi (like Chatgpt) on the brain are beginning to appear, and one term keeps coming back: Cognitive outsourcing . What that means is simply that the cognitive effort required for certain tasks is delegated to the machine: you outsource your thinking, so to speak. 'So to speak' because ‘Thinking’ really needs to be better defined: the vaguer your terms, the vaguer your thinking with and from them. ‘Thinking’ involves not only the logical tools necessary in analysing, drawing conclusion, making connections: it’s also to do with your desire to use such tools, your dispositions towards implementing thinking skills to understand the world. In that sense, when it comes to GenAI use, Cognitive Outsourcing really means leaving all those aspects of thinking to the machine. The problem is what those scientific...

  Fiction as a safe place When it comes to citizenship education, a great many approaches can be taken, depending on which aspect of it you want to emphasise, or work on: you may be interested in the ‘Norms and values’ aspects, and want to come to grips with the workings of the democratic system, say. Or you may want to concentrate on the skills needed, for example communication skills; or you may focus on global citizenship, aspects of culture and inter-cultural communication and multi-cultural societies. Or you may be more interested in attending to critical thinking and its development in your learners. One issue any such approach will have, however, is that of loyalty. Loyalty to a family, loyalty to traditions, loyalty to a belief (system), loyalty to a culture. The bond that loyalty creates is strong, and will often override such notions as objectivity, multi-perspectival approach and willingness to consider different viewpoints. Thus when discussing, say, Dutch democracy...

    The NRA, the infamous American National Rifle Association that defends the right to bear arms, has long used what is known as a ‘False analogy’ to back up its claims that everyone should have the right to buy, carry and use a weapon, however dangerous. This analogy runs like this: ‘Guns are not the problem: people are. Guns on their own do nothing, it’s how you use them that is the problem’. It’s a false analogy because by the same reasoning, nothing is a problem on its own, and the ones responsible are the users. So the analogy continues: you don’t blame hammers for being a potential weapon to kill with, why should you blame guns? If no-one uses guns to kill other people, guns are simply…not dangerous. I keep seeing the same sort of disingenuous, mendacious and illogical reasoning used when it comes to AI, especially GenAI (like Chatgpt): AI is not the problem, you are. AI is a wonderful thing, it’s the users who don’t understand it, misuse it, abuse it, fraud with i...

  Short, even very short…but powerful One constant problem for teachers of literature at secondary schools is to do with preparation: that of the learners as much as that of themselves. Learners, when asked to read a text in advance, will usually turn up not having done so; or if they have, it was probably just a glance, or a quick read-through, maybe a few minutes only before the lesson started. (To be fair, I’ve know the opposite albeit only rarely, when a student would read the texts so much in advance that they’d sort of forgotten everything about them when lesson-time came round). We all know the consequences of that non-reading-in-advance problem: what to do in class if no-one’s read the text? Some solutions spring to mind of course, like handling the text then and there when class starts for example. But that often leads to more problems because those texts will usually be too long to be read in class, or will at least take up so much time of said class that there will...

  Those apparently 'simple' tasks we delegate to Chatgpt will end up costing us more than we know In his 1994 noir novel ‘Gun, with occasional music’, the American writer Jonathan Lethem thought up a bleak version of the future in which the State makes the taking of a certain drug compulsory: that drug is called ‘Forgettol’, and it basically erases your memories, short or long, and makes it impossible to remember even basic facts about yourself, let alone others. That then leads to the invention of the ‘memory-box’: a device characters use to effectively externalize their brain. That memory-box stores all those memories your brain can’t handle; in fact, it stores all the information your brain can’t handle. The benefits for the state are obvious (no possibility of rebellion), but the effects on people and society are terrible: a fragmentation of one’s consciousness which leads to a fragmentation of the social fabric. Sounds familiar? When the printing press started to spre...

  Over the last few decades, a lot of publications have appeared on the importance of using literature at schools – or, in more general terms, the importance of literature tout court . So variously, literature has been found to be good for empathy, perspective-taking, language development, culture, historical knowledge, personal growth, critical thinking, citizenship or both at the same time . Of course, we are all aware that at the same time, reading is declining (for example in England , in The Netherlands , in France ), parents and educators complain young people don’t read, can’t read, won’t read, even if we can all see that those same parents and educators must, by definition, form part of this non-reading public. Do as I say, not as I do. So we can see it coming, not because we can predict the future but because that future is already here: reading literature is a niche activity, one undertaken by a very small subset of our populations and largely upheld by education syst...

  One aspect of the research published around the teaching of literature ( literatuuronderwijs , in the Netherlands) is how often it is conducted with the higher reaches of schools: vwo 5, vwo 6 for example. Or that research is conducted with an implicit line of development: it starts in Year 1 at secondary school and finishes in Year 6. And because only vwo go to Year 6, it’s clear that if you’re not in vwo, you’ll stop short of achieving whatever those in vwo can (or are supposed to) achieve: that’s exemplified in the oft-quoted ‘literary competence’ of Witte, which, let’s be honest, makes little sense. Why on earth would we want all our students to be literary competent? What for? To be experts at reading a niche market like literature? Why then leave visual literacy – surely a much more pressing problem in the world of social media – out of education? And the biggest problem is of course: does that mean those in vmbo or havo can have no hope – are given no hope – of reachin...