This is an article aimed at helping A Level English students with their wider reading. It may also be useful for those studying other subjects in the arts and humanities.
Part One – 'Reason not the need...'
Having taught A Level classes for fifteen years, I've noticed my fellow teachers using the word 'hinterland' increasingly often.
A colleague might say “Not only is Student X methodical in his essay-writing, but he has an impressive hinterland, too.”
A hinterland is a body of knowledge that a student has acquired because of his or her extracurricular interests and enthusiasms.
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Compared to the syllabuses in science subjects, English Literature syllabuses are quite vague regarding what students need to learn. You aren't issued with a finite list of information that you need to know in order to score excellent marks.
“Do we need to know this for the exam?” is probably the question that students ask their teachers most often.
Science teachers can answer this question relatively easily. It's much harder for an English teacher to do so. Yes, exam boards publish glossaries of useful literary terms. However, their compilers emphasise that these glossaries do not contain 'all you need to know to score an A*'.
If, say, the word 'epistrophe' doesn't occur in such a glossary, does it follow that it's futile to learn what 'epistrophe' means? The answer is 'obviously not'.
In fact, students who ask whether they need to know a particular piece of information are already thinking in terms that disadvantage them when it comes to scoring excellent marks in English.
They are also creating an obstacle that prevents them from enjoying the subject.
It is here that developing an intellectual hinterland becomes useful.
There is a strong correlation between students who read books that aren't on the syllabus and those who excel at A Level.
There is also a strong correlation between students with wide active vocabularies and those who excel at A Level.
Such students have developed a hinterland.
Not only are they likelier to cope better with, say, the analysis of unseen poetry, but their teachers will frequently end up learning from them.
For example, amongst many other things, I have learned the following from students during classroom discussions:
* the meaning of the word 'syzygy'
* what a 'Gish gallop' is
* the history of the Tea Party movement
* that lobster was considered a 'poverty food' in 19th century New England
* the nature of grammar in traditional Chinese poetry
* the critical status of Paul Grimault within French cinematic culture
I am not suggesting that knowing about these things necessarily equipped these students for success in their exams; neither do I want to fall into the trap of regarding familiarity with a range of obscure topics as evidence of intelligence.
However, in these conversations and others, I was impressed by the curiosity of the students involved, evidence of an urge to reach beyond the familiar and enjoy learning about new subjects and thinking about them in critical terms. Such an attitude is an excellent starting point for the successful A Level student.
Part Two – Obsolescent Knowledge
This is not the kind of cheap journalistic rant that tries to blame young people for what they don't know.
However, I am frequently struck by students' lack of familiarity with what was once considered common knowledge.
Take the poem 'Material' by Ros Barber, one of the 'Poems of the Decade' that features on the Pearson / Edexcel syllabus.
The poem's speaker reflects on the loss of traditional habits across generations, both within a family and, perhaps, across British society at large.
She uses a number of 'homely props' as metonyms to evoke the civic and social fabric of Britain in the late 60s and early 70s. We encounter allusions to 'the friendly butcher', 'The Annual Talent Show', gifts of handkerchiefs from 'distant aunts' that required boil-washing. These are clichés in the word's least pejorative sense – images with ready-made associations signifying a wider culture – in this case, one of companionable neighbourliness. The speaker is clearly conscious of their status as clichés and the evocative power that this lends them.
Barber's poem evokes a world that I'm slightly too young to remember myself. However, it's one that I recognise from reading social histories, from watching the TV of yesteryear and from conversations with my family.
However, when I first introduced a class of A Level students to it in 2015, they were baffled.
Reasonably enough, I had to explain some obsolescent slang to them ('naffest', 'ponce'). More remarkably, however, they seemed unaware that Britain's high streets were once dominated by specialised shops run by family proprietors. The notion that you might know the name of your greengrocer struck one of them as bordering on laughable. At points, I might as well have been describing an ancient, mythical kingdom.
Not only did I have to explain what the individual clichés signified, I had to explain to them that, to another generation, they were clichés.
This is the most striking manifestation of a recurrent pattern: students are increasingly unaware of once-popular idioms. I can recall another poem dextrously punning on the phrase 'the show ain't over till the fat lady sings'. This was met with blank looks from the entire class.
It's hard for teachers to explain how a poet is playing with an idiom when students aren't aware of that idiom to begin with.
An awareness of idioms from the present and the recent past, forms a valuable part of any Literature student's intellectual hinterland.
Maintaining a broad vocabulary is also crucial. I've known students who have struggled in public exams because they have had to guess the meanings of significant words in the questions. Such unknown vocabulary could not reasonably be described as obscure: words such as 'delusion', 'ambiguity' and 'redemption' have all proved troublous on occasions.
Part Three – The future
My class's response to 'Material' represents a division between generations which I don't want to overstate but can't ignore.
British people of Ros Barber's generation (she was born in 1964) would have likely grown up in a nation characterised by certain shared experiences: both the parochial ones that 'Material' describes and those accessed through collective experience of TV and other mass media.
To state the obvious, contemporary, algorithm-driven culture impels us to pursue our pre-existing interests.
We don't have to tolerate exposure to that which doesn't interest us, in our hours of leisure at least.
Digital culture has undermined the idea of 'common knowledge' – that body of idioms, ideas and reference-points which it's assumed we all share without having to learn formally.
'Memes have replaced idioms' as a former student eloquently put it.
To come to my point, pupils and students now have to learn to actively furnish their hinterland with new vocabulary, concepts, knowledge.
We can no longer rely on the prospect of their doing so osmotically by exposure to mass culture.
Some schools have risen admirably to this challenge. Structured programmes of enrichment activities are worthwhile means of taking students beyond their intellectual comfort zones and cultivating intellectual curiosity.
However, I think that this challenge is best met in schools with an individuated approach.
Teachers need to know what fires each student's curiosity (and the factors that deaden or impede it) and to begin nurturing that curiosity, extending its reach, encouraging critical engagement wherever possible.
If this all seems idealistic, it's because the only alternative that I can see is defeatism or the dreary instrumentalism where knowledge is treated purely as a necessary means to exam grades.
Reaching the end of writing this article, it's hard to avoid sounding fatuous.
I'm well aware of the sort of clichés that 'inspiring teachers' spout in films and don't want to lapse into using them.
But if an educator doesn't want to inspire students' curiosity, then s/he has failed.
I'm not compelling you to adopt a wholesome, wide-eyed fascination with the world around you.
But I do think that any sixth-former should ask themselves the following questions:
What interests me? Why? How will I go about developing this interest both at school and outside?
Answers to these questions might well be tentative and incomplete – but such answers are the basis of building the curiosity from which all learning emanates.
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