Teaching English becomes diffficult as no one knows about The Bible !

The Poet Andrew Motion says it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach English Literature because students do not know the Bible or classical mythology.

I've always been concerned about the levels of not-knowing since I started teaching, but quite recently I had a very bad experience of trying to teach some of my, in other respects, extremely good students about Paradise Lost.

They knew so little about the context in which the poem was written and about the references that the poem itself makes that it was very difficult even to get beyond go in talking about it. I'm not trying to give them a dusty and bitter pill to swallow here, I'm just saying that these stories achieve archetypal status because they tell us recurring truths about human nature that is a pleasure and an important thing in and of itself.

I recently have interviewed quite a lot of candidates who have done Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's play, for 'A' level.Not a single one of them seemed to have known the title comes from Christ's Sermon on the Mount and that might make a difference to what the play's about.

Andrew Motion
For BBC Radio 4