Go Get 'Em, TS Eliot!

It's difficult, very difficult, to balance a horde of students, an Open University course, a proofreading job, an eccentric blog of miscellaneous nonsense, and a thousand other smaller things. In fact, it is almost impossible! However... there are ways and means... it will all get easier in time...

As an English tutor, part of the time anyway, you start looking for articles to throw at your students for comprehension exercises, and find all kinds of things. For example, the Silfra Fissure, in which divers can actually touch two continental plates at once, of the Zimmerman telegram, which pushed the USA into the First World War against Woodrow Wilson's wishes. There's a much nicer world of Internet content out there, if you can but find it. The Smithsonian online magazine pages seem particularly nice for this purpose, as do some sections of The Atlantic. Yes, magazines are still alive and well in some parts of the world!

Wow. Magazines. A substantial magazine hasn't been spotted in these parts for more than ten years, and then it was promptly cancelled! I think it was BBC MindGames, actually, and even that was more of a puzzle book. We don't seem to have the likes of 'The New Yorker', 'National Geographic', 'The Atlantic' or even 'The Smithsonian' here in the United Kingdom. Are we just a population of illiterate goons, believing everything pushed out in pulpy newspapers of utmost bias? Some magazines would be nice. And some people actually reading books. At the moment my most well read acquaintance is a GCSE student, which is lovely, but worrying at the same time.

It's odd to think that we've slid so far from the pinnacles of education, that great enabler. We are supposed to be taught to teach ourselves and become fully independent people, but somehow we've ended up being forced into systems that don't work any more, and enslaved to screens of information we don't actually need. As TS Eliot wrote - in 'The Rock' - and was repeated in 'Oliver's Travels':

"Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

We have masses of information, but is it useful or is it part of a much larger dungeon of which we only ever spot the edges from the corners of our eyes.

O.