'The Poor' in the Twenty-First Century?

As is often the case for PhD students - bright-eyed, naive, and maybe plain daft - I've recently been working as a teaching assistant on an undergraduate course. Remember the person who smirked one moment and wrung their hands the next, alternated between mind-blowing arrogance and unbelievable ignorance, and packed you into a drab office-tower seminar room on a Thursday morning when you'd rather be in bed, they'd rather be in bed, and the seconds ticked by as slowly as the sands of time... Well, that's me now. Only more ignorant.

One of the ploys I like to use to engage students on something that they might not know much about, and probably don't want to know much about, is the idea that beliefs of 'the past'

are just as apparent today, but expressed in a different type of language. Structurally apparent in, say, a class-based system, if you will. So, this week on a miserable autumn's morning, our discussion passed onto the subject of perceptions of the equally miserable British poor in the nineteenth century. In particular, we highlighted the concerns of the Reverend Thomas Malthus. In a nutshell, Malthus wrote that methods of poor relief like the Speenhamland System, which gave higher amounts of money based on the size of your family, 'encouraged' people to be poor. Consequently, the poor as a group would keep growing disproportionately in relation to the rest of society.

What an absolutely luuuuuudicrous idea!!!!!!!!! What kind of out-of-touch, dinosaur, elitist, know-nothing-no-good-right-wing-lunatic would believe such a thing?!?!?!

Ahem. In step New Tory peer, Howard Flight.

"We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive.... But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that's not very sensible."

He may be talking about benefits rather than 'outdoor relief', but is the point being made really that different?

My students managed a wry smile, but they may have just been humouring me - or, perhaps, with the way this current government is working out, nothing surprises them that much anymore? Either way, and not that surprisingly, history repeats itself.

"History books re-written twenty years after fall of Berlin Wall"

Here's an interesting article from the Telegraph about the teaching of history in eastern Europe. The chanaging nature of textbooks in the former states of the Soviet Union are redefining how students are learning about the history of Communism.

Textbooks in Poland, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic now include information on anti-communism, as well as the expulsions and executions that occured during the communist regimes.

"In Latvia, what was once called 'the voluntary incorporation' of countries in the former Soviet bloc, is now qualified as a Soviet 'occupation'. The deportation of tens of thousands of Latvians to Soviet camps in 1941 and 1949, once unheard of, is also now part of the school curriculum."

But despite this 'objectivity', teachers are still having to cope with the clash between history and memory "history books still fail to beat the vivid accounts of that period that students hear from their parents". One Romanian teacher states, "Eighty per cent of adults were nostalgic about the Communist era, when there was no unemployment or financial problems."