18th February 2011 9:05
By Blue Tutors
I was talking with a friend the other day about the historic events in Egypt, and I told her I'm discussing it with my students. What do you teach, she asks? GCSE English. So discussing the social, political and historic points of Mubarak's departure may not seem the first choice for teaching English, but for many students, I really believe it should be. The truth is that many students these days have a worrying limited understanding of wider culture, history and politics. They don't read newspapers, they don't watch the news on television and they wouldn't know who Margaret Thatcher was if she hit them over the head with poll tax.
Does this really matter for the purposes of teaching English? To me, it matters greatly, because one of the best ways to help students understand literature is through drawing analogies with current situations that they have a better chance of relating to. You can't sucessfully teach 'Of Mice and Men' without engendering understanding of the American Dream and the depression. Today in British society, it is all too easy to taste the air of unease, the disappointment and fear that surrounds our current political arrangement and the state of the economy. Simply by becoming more aware of the factors that shape people's lives, students have a much better chance of understanding the social forces driving George and Lennie on their own journey.
This is one of the reasons that I'm not concerned with students watching too much television per se, I just care what they watch. A sheltered student generation which has no awarenes of political and social processes is unlikely to grasp the fundamental significance of the novels they read in class. This is something that tutors and teachers need to address quickly, before we create a generation which has no understanding of even their parent's history.