On Literature and Teaching

  There sometimes seems to be a misconception around the use of literature (= fiction) in class as regards the time needed, the nature of the texts used, the activities organised around it, and the way we teachers can work on citizenship-related issues. Very broadly speaking (as I know for a fact that many teachers devote hours and hours of their own time to devise a curriculum), we could say that many schools: ·        See fiction as an example of a time-period or a context, where a text becomes a fact ( who, when, what about ), an exemplar – the text is not discussed because essentially it is a label and a cultural-historical object (for example: Byron was a romantic, we’re having a project on Romanticism, so Byron’s name is mentioned as one of the romantic poets; nothing further is done with his texts than showing one of them). ·        See literature classes as isolated from the rest of the world, and therefore the curriculum (this week, we’re having a literature project! Aft

  Fiction as a safe place The great, late French historian Paul Veyne, having shown that the ancient Greeks both believed and did not believe in their own myths, asks a question: what was the use of those myths for the Greeks then? Why did senators routinely use mythical references and examples in their speech to their fellow politicians? Veyne’s answers is that it enabled them to discuss actual political matters in a roundabout way, so that political sensibilities would not be hurt by hearing a particular problem discussed openly. In other words, senators would use a myth to introduce a question at play in Athens’ society, but which was too sensitive to some to be aired directly: it needed to be metaphorised , in a way – it needed to be about problem A but discussed in terms of Myth B. This Fiction-as-a-safe-place is one of the great advantages of using literature in class to discuss citizenship-related issues. The Council of Europe (2018), among others, breaks down Citizenshi

  ‘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

[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