Past caring about history?

 Why has a wider knowledge become so narrow?

Every time I teach a new literary text to a student, I am excited to share the context of its historical period with them. Understanding the social and historical background to a text can help to bring it to life, illustrating what motivated the author, what they rebelled against or were shaped by, whether they realised it or not. It is crucially important when studying older texts, like Shakespeare or Dickens, which can seem so remote from the lives of young people today, but it is also important to remember that events which happened in the 1980’s and 90’s might as well be medieval to a 15-year-old. Studying Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers requires an understanding of Thatcherism and the politics that shaped the decade in which she presided over No. 10. Knowing the background not only enriches understanding, but it also helps to present the authors as real people with real lives. Furthermore, it is part of the curriculum in a somewhat exam-centric world with ‘context’ part of the boxes to tick in exam mark schemes. 

But perhaps thereupon lies part of the problem: an exam-centric system designed to tick boxes but not provide an interesting wider knowledge which goes beyond that. Teachers don’t have time to develop the depth of knowledge which deepens understanding before they have to move on to the next box checking exercise. As a private tutor, I teach one pupil at a time, it’s more bespoke to that student, so I do have time for the discussions that I so enjoyed in some of the classes when I was at school. I segway and go off at tangents all the time. Discussing things like the gunpowder plot, little details like the ‘serpent and rose medal’ James 1^st commissioned, and how these are relevant to Macbeth, I find, sets the student’s minds alight (metaphorical pun absolutely intended!). Not only that, but pretty much without exception, the students I teach raise their final grades by 3 from those their school predicted. 

 

So why am I feeling a bit despondent of late? Well, I am finding that in the last couple of years, the students have absolutely zero knowledge of any history beyond the bit in the syllabus they have to learn, so their understanding is patchy at best. They are interested, trust me, and for many it’s the best part of having to wade through their Literature texts because it finally begins to make sense. So, what’s going on? Is it all because they are drilled to be part of the infernal GCSE machine where only necessary facts are fed in and spat out on the most superficial level for an hour in an exam hall? Or is it something else?

 

When I was a child, before I went to high school, I had met actual Victorian people, people who had lost a lung in World War one; my grandparents fought and lived during World War 2; I met my great-grandparents – I had seen a mangle and a Dolly in a kitchen; heard and learned all the Old Time Music Hall songs. I read and watched all the Sherlock Holmes stories; I devoured information about Jack the Ripper, Kings and Queens, the abdication; Cavemen and dinosaurs; I knew about Marylin Monroe, watched Laurel and Hardy; knew about American Politics, British politics, James Dean and Nellie Deane – in short I had books on everything and I had long conversations about them too. And my son is the same – he, like me, can speak about anything with anybody, and if the knowledge is not so good, we know how to stay curious about the world. But now I regularly encounter a surprise – students who do not know who Marylin Monroe is; students who have never heard of Laurel and Hardy, Intelligent students who believe that World War 2 was in the Victorian Era. They confidently state that Shakespeare’s plays were written in the ‘Shakespearean’ (or sometimes ‘Jamesian’) era and although they are studying The Charge of the Light Brigade for their poetry exam, they don’t know when the Crimean War was, why it happened, who was involved and, in general, many of the words they are reading are a mystery which they have no idea how to pronounce. Words such as ‘haphazard’, ‘entice’, ‘lighted’, or ‘enlivened’ are all real examples of words which do not exist in the vocabularies of some 16-year-olds. Some students have made connections to certain poems with ‘9/11’ (ancient history to them) which they state with assurance happened in 2011… 

 

I’m not making fun of them – far from it. And I have to add that it's most often my neurodivergent students who are the most curious and do know the answer, so maybe neurodivergence imparts an innate  curiosity about the world? In all honesty, though, why should they know about film stars from the 1950s? But on the other hand, why shouldn’t they? I was born in 1971, but by the age of 3 I was well aware of people who existed in the decades before I was born, shaping our world and making valuable contributions to it. And if you are studying English Literature, it is essential to understand the references in the texts. It is the key to understanding and appreciating them. How can you really understand ‘Of Mice and Men’ without knowing about the Great Depression? How do you laugh at the Dramatic Irony created by Mr Birling’s assurance that the Titanic is ‘Unsinkable’ in An Inspector Calls? How do you unpick the religious references in poetry or prose if you have never even heard of the 23^rd Psalm? It’s an easy fix for me – I teach them. But I feel sad that there will be legions of future adults who don’t know and don’t pass on that knowledge. Slowly, I imagine our world getting smaller, and our history being lost.

 

Is it because we don’t talk to each other anymore? I picture the group of friends I saw recently in a restaurant: six young people, all couples, all of them on their individual phones tapping and swiping away. Such knowledge at our fingertips now, but no inclination to use it except to doom scroll nonsense. Cynically, it’s a way of keeping the general population dumbed down, passive and in their place, isn’t it? If we don’t talk, how can we make change; if we don’t have a sense of history, how do we spot negative patterns and stop making the same mistakes over and over again? We need to sit up and take note of how lazy and insular we are becoming, because sooner rather than later, we’ll be ruled by a party we didn’t vote for; we’ll let AI make our decisions and answer our questions with only one ‘correct’ answer without any comprehension of the subtle nuances of human emotion and complexity, and no sense of asking why.

 

Is it because we have children later in life now, or move away from extended families, so there are no great-grandparents or even grandparents to talk to? Is it because schools do not have assemblies anymore, so children don’t hear hymns and Psalms. I’m not religious at all, but Bible tales are ingrained on my memory – and very useful it is too in my work. My Granddad was not particularly religious, but he read the Bible, the Koran, invited Jehovah’s Witnesses in to discuss their beliefs – because he wanted to know things. He was probably one of the few 97-year-olds who could easily have won Who Wants to be a Millionaire simply because of the extent of his knowledge on any subject from Eastenders to Nuclear Physics.

 

I don’t know the answer. But I continue to make it my little mission to extend a student’s knowledge beyond the superficial soundbites necessary to pass the exam. I tell them about the battle between Oasis and Blur; I tell them about the Toxteth Riots and the Poll Tax Riots; I tell them that Arthur Miller married Marylin Monroe, and that JFK was assassinated in 1963; I explain how that small quote from Blake symbolises the Industrial Revolution, or what the reference to ‘Dr Fell’ really means in Jekyll and Hyde. (The reason why, I cannot tell!) I tell them about the 70’s and 80’s and 90’s from my own experience – I make the stories they read real. I hope they will remember it long after they leave the examination hall and pass it on to someone else; that they will keep learning and questioning and provoking and never stop asking what, and where, and when, and who, and how, and why.