History Up-to-Date

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 123, 31 October 1941, Page 5

History Up-to-Date

: DO you remember last week we were talking of the man who hates Shakespeare because he had to read him in school. Teachers are coming more and more to realise that the best way to teach the history of literature is to teach it backwards. And the same thing is true of the teaching of a great deal of history. When I was at school

we began each year with Julius Caesar in 55 B.C. and by the end of the session had got up to Barbarossa and the Medicis. Next year back we went to Julius Caesar again. It wasn’t till my last year at school that a fortunate accident put me under a master who actually had the effrontery to begin at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-

tury and by the end of the year he was encouraging us to bring the morning paper into the history class. We suddenly realised that Julius Caesar and the morning paper were both history, and strange though

it may seem our reading of the morning paper brought Julius Caesar closer to us. The same thing is true of the appreciation, of literature. B: To which I say fervently, Hear! Hear! No one even thought of bringing a morning paper into class when I was at school. Incidentally, we used to start books and never finish them. I don’t think we finished one of the French set books, which made the lessons very dull. I may say the books were generally pretty dull to begin with-(" Can Literary Appreciation Be, Taught?" A discussion with Professor Gerdon, 2Y A, October 20.)