There's more to study than politics

The combined effect of excess and over-correction, both sides prone to dogmatic extremes or misunderstandings, may have been a loss of bearings for many university students, many of whom, over that long period, have now become school teachers and curriculum setters themselves.

Of course loss of bearings may have an exciting postmodernist flavour; every dogma has its strands of sense, and no one's questioning the enthusiasm or intelligence of teachers. But even the most committed must sometimes wonder where the rest of the literature went.

Does the politics go all the way down? Can't we ever make contact with a character or another human being, in literature or life, without seeing their gender, race, class or party affiliation as the most important thing about them?

I recently spent a morning with a group of highly competent and professional Year 11 and 12 teachers, who were concerned about the small number of boys enrolling in English classes. They felt that politicised approaches to the relations between and characteristic qualities of the two sexes in literature were utterly alienating boys while not particularly appealing to girls, either.

What mustn't get forgotten in all of this is that literature often thinks as intensely and deeply about politics as it does about every other aspect of the human condition (the more intensely and deeply it thinks the better it is and the longer it endures, generally).

In Dido, the first true feminist, Antony, Cleopatra or Othello, or any of their literary companions, past and present, it works at the level we all have to work at: of living and making sense of our lives in all their constituent parts among other people.

Politics is an extremely important aspect of how we get on together (in polities, strictly), and we properly study and teach the science of it in all its complexity, as well as practising it in our lives.

But even when we are acting politically we are also acting emotionally, ethically (or not), and rationally (or not): and literature thinks about all that too. It asks questions of its readers; it reads them.

Too often literature is read as anything else but. Yet it isn't history, it isn't philosophy, it isn't social science.

It's difficult in its own way; in the way whole people, whole minds, hearts and lives, are difficult, not least in their connections (including political connections) with other minds, hearts and lives.

And that's where young men and women in school literature classes need to begin.

If literature is politicised too early and too exclusively (I only say "if"), then it may never reveal its true power as political thought.