What Are Your Cultural References?

A couple of years ago I was listening to a radio debate between two academics, one might have been John Mullan, professor of English at UCL, on the subject of current difficulties surrounding the teaching of English at university level.

The essence of the debate was that, say thirty years ago, lecturers in English could assume that their students had a reasonable working knowledge of The Bible and also of Greek mythology when they entered university. As a consequence, references to these works by teachers in the course of teaching English could be relied upon to be understood by all students without any difficulty at all.

Nowadays however, no such assumption can be made. Bright students enrolling on English Literature courses in the 21st century may never have read the Bible either as a spiritual text or as a piece of literature. Moreover, it would appear that as the teaching of Latin and Greek has almost completely disappeared from the curriculum of state schools and with their demise, a whole raft of traditional cultural references such as the siege of Troy and Caesar’s Gallic Wars is also absent from the minds of most university entrants. So many university arts faculties are seemingly having to provide introductory courses covering the Bible, as literature of course, and ancient myth so that students are given some notion of the cultural context of their subject specialisms.

So what are the relevant cultural references for young people today? I would guess that popular music predominates, just look at the news and comment coverage given to the death of Michael Jackson throughout the British press. Sport or rather sporting achievement also seems to loom large in the popular psyche of the young. I would guess that there are few who know nothing of the exploits of Andy Murray, and in Wales especially, most young people will have some idea of the exploits of the British Lions. And the England Women’s Cricket Team? Possibly. Reality TV programmes and their participants also seem to be important cultural identifiers for the young, as do soap operas and their characters. But what else? What of art, poetry, or prose? Are these considered key indicators of modern culture?

I ask these questions because as I get older, I am becoming increasingly bemused by the trivia I know and others don’t, and by what others know and I don’t. So much so that I sometimes question whether or not I am living in the same country as my friends and acquaintances, let alone the same planet. So there seems to be a generational gap with regard to cultural referencing. Or am I simply ageing, and not even gracefully?