‘Why do we study another culture?’: the question is one that many Polish students enrolled in teacher training colleges and departments of English Philology must ask themselves, sometimes with an underlying note of desperation in their voices. Faced with a one or two semester course surveying British or English history or American geography the prospect might seem an attractive flight from further hours on linguistics or methods of teaching, more than often it looks like a burden that has to be carried with the least possible effort and then dumped as quickly as possible. In truth, there are various reasons, some pragmatic, some idealistic, why we study another culture. These reasons can be grouped under three general headings, which I will discuss in turn: curriculum, curiosity, and critical thinking.

The first and most obvious answer to my question ‘why do we study another culture’ is ‘because it is on the curriculum.’ This is, though, the kind of non-answer given when the question is poorly considered or not raised at all. It means that we study a foreign culture because it is there, because the Polish Ministry of Education says it ought to be studied, and because there are a certain number of hours in the timetable that have to be filled up each week. A slightly more meaningful answer is that students study history, (and history is my main example throughout because I am a historian), or geography for instance, as a kind of background. Often history is seen as a prerequisite that is necessary to understanding literature, which is prioritised in philology departments, or language and methods of teaching, which are more important in the teacher training colleges. Related to this is the belief that studying these subjects gives another opportunity to work with the target language, to expand vocabulary, speaking and writing practice. In this model culture teaching serves a relatively modest role, it is not seen as the star of the show, rather it supports other lead players within the curriculum.

There are some further assumptions that underlie the place of culture teaching. The first of these is that a survey course best serves the needs of the student; that by giving a global knowledge of the subject, no matter how superficial, the student is then, somehow, better equipped. What this often comes down to though, is a cramming exercise in dates and names, and an examination where the owner of the best memory gets the best grades. The second assumption is that history, civilization and geography courses are best taught, or at least most conveniently taught, by language teachers within the department, though they often lack the proper materials and training to do the job effectively. All teachers begin somewhere of course, and this is not to deny that there are some excellent courses of this type. Nevertheless given what appears to be the relatively low status of culture courses, and the limits of resources, it does seem that these assumptions serve culture students poorly.

Where materials are available, produced within Poland or abroad, there is the question of who sets the curricular agenda and to what end. In history, for example, the most straightforward approach is a chronological narrative. This kind of history teaching has its roots in the nineteenth century beginnings of the historical profession, when the main purpose of the subject was grounding for the new national identities of the various European nations. The European tradition of narrative history is, in other words, often a tradition of nationalist history, and in this sense the teaching of history, consciously or not, reflects Polish historiography and popular Polish memory, with their emphasis on kings and queens, battles and rebellions, and ‘great men.’ As Norman Davies has written though, ‘The problem of national bias is probably best observed in the realm of school textbooks and popular histories. The more that historians have to condense and to simplify their material, the harder it is to mask their prejudice.’(1)

The problem is, however, much wider than this, and it relates to the historical development of Anglo-American culture in relation to eastern-central Europe. While Polish culture is nationalistic, traditionalistic and defensive of its literature and language, western culture is imperialistic, pluralistic and expansive. The same process occurred in many other ways after 1989 because English is in many ways the world’s language; its history and literature are so widely and skilfully disseminated, not least because of the colonial practice of teaching the virtues of the motherland; and because western popular culture – music, film and fiction – sell so successfully around the globe.

In considering why we study another culture, one must consider the historical relationship between the culture that studies and the culture that is studied. It is this power relationship, determined by economics and politics, that forms background assumptions, and informs what aspects of culture are taught and in what ways they are presented and received. My point here is not that Polish culture is being ‘swamped’ by foreign influences, nor that western text books somehow set the ‘wrong’ agenda; rather, that we need to think carefully about how culture becomes curriculum and to what end, which leads to my second theme: how we make and how we answer curiosity.

Curiosity may be the cat’s assassin, but it is also a valuable tool – and, as every good teacher knows, it is the starting point for knowledge and the systematic discipline of learning. It is a quality to be answer and to be fostered, and one that enables the student to educate himself. This raises the difficult question of where initiative lies within the Polish education system. Too often it seems that students entering university or teacher training college lack either initiative or curiosity because of a facts and figures based approach in the schools, and because they dare not risk their own independent opinion for fear of offending the teacher. Culture courses, if well taught, can help overcome this problem, and especially if students are encouraged, right from the beginning, to question the sources of knowledge they encounter, including both textbook and teacher.

Each teacher must figure out for him or herself how best to channel the enthusiasm of the student, though admittedly in some cases this seems impossible. Textbooks are another matter though. Everyone who has taught a culture course knows that textbooks are a resource to be exploited and raided in some ways and ignored in others. Some textbooks are so dull though that no student ought to read them, usually because they are incapable of showing culture as a living, dynamic process, and instead reduce it to a list of dull clichés. Other studies deserve to be retired because they are just out of date. The classic example here is G.M. Trevelyan’s English Social History, which some still use in introductory history survey courses. The title itself indicates a problem  - the outdated conflation of English and British history and literature. Moreover, Trevelyan’s work has an obvious appeal because it provides the ‘background’ to the study of literature even in its chapter titles such as ‘Chaucer’s England’ or ‘Dr Johnson’s England’. The flaws far outweigh such questionable merits though.

The faith Trevelyan places in literary sources was unjustified and he was therefore often misguided in his judgements; he was nostalgic too for the age before the Industrial Revolution, as he imagined it, disliking mass society, ignoring the mass of working people, and preferring to discuss the smaller, less representative group of literates. Trevelyan’s efforts to write ‘the history of a people with the politics left out’ led to a deeply conservative rewriting of the past, one without any power to explain events or to theorise the workings of society. (2) Within Britain, historical scholarship has moved on and Trevelyan’s work rarely read today.

The problem is also one of how a foreign culture should be taught, because usually both student and teacher are limited by the degree of their exposure to the living experience of the culture they study. It is the salient features that are most easily transmitted therefore, and which form the idea of a canon of knowledge: the Spanish Amada, Ernest Hemingway, and the structures of the political system. Yet, to anyone within the culture itself these are at best the highlights and at worst, the clichés of the society in which they live. Curiosity can only be stimulated, can only be answered therefore by moving beyond the realm of both highlight and cliché, and by approaching culture as lived experience; as an interactive process where ideas, experience and feelings add up to produce a field of values, opinions and expressions. (This is as close I want to get to a definition of culture here, because my purpose is rather to discuss how it functions.) There are clearly facts to learn and knowledge to master, but beyond this there is a requirement for understanding how literature, history or geography, relate to the present day.

One way to achieve this, I think, is by using primary historical sources as the subject for discussion and analysis. To give two examples, Images of English Identity 1800-1960 is an anthology of fiction, poetry, speeches and historical writing that examines changing views of nation and belonging that allows a thematic approach to an important contemporary issue.  (3) Nation, Migration and Identity in the British Isles since 1700 is an anthology of first-hand migrant accounts that looks at related themes using interviews, autobiographies, and investigative journalism. (4)

By using such sources, students experience a wide range of language, are skilled in the arts of textual analysis, and escape the confines of a restricted canon of knowledge. (I am assuming here that cultural knowledge should be self-sufficient, not any kind of background, and that it should not primarily exist to serve the needs of the culture in which it is taught, but should also be about seeing a foreign culture as it sees itself.) Creating a space between two cultures where it becomes possible to critically examine and question both is not confined to the relation between two nations, it can also exist within one nation where there are contested meanings of what makes a literary canon or what constitutes an historical past. E.P.Thompson has described an analogous situation when discussing the Second World War. He writes: (5)

  One is not permitted to speak of one’s wartime reminiscences today, nor is one under any impulse to do so. It is an area of general reticence: an unmentionable subject among younger friends, and perhaps of mild ridicule among those of radical opinion. All this is understood. And one understands also why it is so.

  It is so, in part, because Chapman Pincher and his like have made an uncontested take-over of all the moral assets of that period; have coined the war into Hollywood blockbusters and spooky paper-backs and television tedia; have attributed all the value of that moment to the mythic virtues of an authoritarian Right which is now, supposedly, the proper inheritor and guardian of the present nation’s interests.

  I walk in my garden, or stand cooking at the stove, and muse on how this came about. My memories of that war are very different.

My memories, and my knowledge of my own country, both as an historian and as a private individual, are also very different from what is taught as British culture in Poland, partly for entirely understandable reasons, for example the need to balance particular and general experiences, but partly too because the values that are presented by the cultural curriculum are also seen as an incontestable space: there is no sense of a clash of morals, of opinions or of interests. Nor does one have to sympathise with E.P.Thompson’s views to see that vital intellectual skills can be gained in the process of contestation, and that those skills of contestation: thinking through questions, debating and arguing, are the essence of a meaningful educational experience. Long after dates, plots and place names are forgotten the ability to ask and answer questions by thoughtful reasoning and criticism remains relevant to the school teacher the translator and the bank worker.

In essence, therefore, the cultural curriculum, because it is content based, and because all content is debatable, is about critical thinking. There are practical ways to achieve this: by opening up questions of canonical status, by explaining and showing culture as a dynamic process rather than a static object, by an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural comparative approach. And this is where Polish students and teachers have an interesting advantage in studying British and American culture: they look and think from the perspective of another background, they are able to examine without the lenses of class or political prejudice to distort their understanding. One proof that this approach can work is the fact that two of the most authoritative histories of Britain were written by Frenchmen Elie Halevy and Francois Bedarida. (6)

This question of perspective works in another way too: it allows the student to look again at his own culture and to examine his own values in the light of something quite different. In this sense, Polish culture seems to be quite uncontested: its sharp taste has been blended inside the unique pressure cooker of the nation’s past. It’s powerful allegiance to the romantic patriots of the nineteenth century finds a parallel therefore in a strong interest in the English romantic poets; Poland’s popular memory of salient historical events, of Monte Cassino or the Rising of 1863 – or 1956 and 1968 for that matter – are guided by the same reference map. In The Polish Complex Tadeusz Konwicki kicks against the oppressive weight of this historical past, but as his translator wrote ‘The typical human act of trying to see oneself is always fascinating, agonising, comical, for we can never turn fast enough to see all sides at once in the mirror.’ (7) To this I can only add that a second mirror cannot solve this problem, but it may give another perspective.

Discussion, dispute and contestation then are the most important part of the cultural curriculum. One model we might turn to here as a way to help imagine how to implement these ideals is that of British art education. In the early 1960s, the Coldstream Report made it possible for art teaching to drop the idea of a traditional canon, and to replace it with a system based around intense critical discourse. Each student, from the first, was expected to work independently, and that work then was discussed in groups and tutorials. Michael Craig-Martin, one of the pioneers of this system describes it as follows: (8)

This retrospective approach to teaching is intended to guide but not to dictate the direction and concerns of the student’s work, to encourage independent thinking and expressive diversity. The aim is to help students develop those characteristics that are essential to sustaining creative activity over a lifetime in a rapidly changing world: productive self-criticism, self-discipline and self-confidence.

These seem to me to be ideal objectives for any curriculum builder to consider.

Faced with a group of recalcitrant or bright eighteen-year-olds, these objectives might seem hopelessly unrealistic. In my own case, the results have been mixed. Teaching the first year British history survey course at the philology department of the Jagiellonian University I have found it difficult in practice to escape the constraints of the narrative approach, or to instil a more questioning attitude in students either to the textbooks they use or to my own opinions. One the other hand there have been some rewarding successes in teaching an MA on British Culture and Society, including very successful theses, for example, on women’s magazines and consumption in the interwar period, on Vera Brittain and the First World War, and on immigrant experience in postwar Britain. Finally, consider this, whatever degree of success you may have achieved in your own classroom. What every student and teacher of a foreign culture does in working together – in the passing on of information, in the answering of questions or in the reading of a textbook – is to make a natural space between cultures. Because nature abhors a vacuum, this space has to fill up somehow, sometimes with cultural studies, sometimes with nationalist conservatism, or with some combination of these. In any event, belonging to neither culture uncritically it becomes possible, curiously, to better scrutinise both.

Notes

(1) DAVIES, Norman. Europe: a history, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 25.

(2) TREVELYAN, George M. English Social History: a survey of six centuries Chaucer to Queen Victoria, Longmans, 1942, vii.

(3) STAMIROWSKA, Krystyna., et al. Images of English Identity 1800-1960. Krakow:  Universitas, 1998.

(4) LEESE, Peter., et al. Nation, Migration and Identity in the British Isles since 1700, forthcoming. For further details and sample extracts see: LEESE, Peter. ‘Movement, Place and Memory: Migration and the British Isles’. In E. Mańczak-Wohlfeld, ed. Tradition and Postmodernity. Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 209-16.

(5)THOMPSON, Edward P. Writing by Candlelight. London: Merlin, 1980, 130-1 in: R. Perks, and A.THOMSON. The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge, 1998, 77-8.

(6) HALEVY, Elie. A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 5 vols. London, 1924-32; BÉDARIDA, Francois. Social History of England, 1851-1975. London, 1979.

(7) KONWICKI, T. The Polish Complex, trans. R. Lourie. Normal IL: Dalkie Archive, 1998, v.

(8) CRAIG-MARTIN, Michael. ‘The role of art education in Britain since the sixties’. In M.Raeburn, et al., Vision: 50 years of British Creativity. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999, 145.

References

BÉDARIDA, Francois. Social History of England, 1851-1975, London. 1979.

CRAIG-MARTIN, Michael. ‘The role of art education in Britain since the sixties’. In M.Raeburn, et al., Vision: 50 years of British Creativity. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999.

DAVIES, Norman. Europe: a history, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

EVANS, Richard. J. In Defence of History. London: Granta, 1997.

HALEVY, Elie. A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 5 vols. London. 1924-32

KONWICKI, Tadeusz. The Polish Complex, trans. R. Lourie. Normal IL: Dalkie Archive, 1998.

LEESE, Peter. ‘Movement, Place and Memory: Migration and the British Isles’. In E. Mańczak-Wohlfeld, ed. Tradition and Postmodernity. Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 209-16.

LEESE, Peter, et al., Nation, Migration and Identity in the British Isles since 1700.  forthcoming.

MAZOWER, M. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.

POPULAR MEMORY GROUP, ‘Popular Memory: theory, politics, method’, in: R.Perks and

A. Thompson, eds, The Oral History Reader, Routledge, 1998, 75-86.

STAMIROWSKA, Krystyna., et al. Images of English Identity 1800-1960. Krakow:  Universitas, 1998.

THOMPSON, Edward P. Writing by Candlelight. London: Merlin, 1980, 130-1 in: R. Perks, and A.Thompson. The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge, 1998, 77-8.

TREVELYAN, George M. English Social History: a survey of six centuries Chaucer to Queen Victoria, London: Longmans, 1942.