It is some years now since I had a set of personal tutees or took some of the general first or second year tutorials in my department (Geography). In the days when I did so I used to find one of the most salutary things to do at the start of the year was to ask students what their earliest memory of a political or world event was. The first observation from their answers was that I had generally forgotten when they were born, and assumed they were older than was in the fact the case, The second observation was that it was surprising how recent many of their first political memories were - a remarkable number of students had no recollection of anything outside their own immediate experience until they were teenagers. This always amazed me. Perhaps I was brought up in a politicised household, but I have remember world events from before I was 10 (in a slightly garbled fashion, in some cases). But the students I deal with are social scientists, and I would have expected them to have taken an early interest in the wider world.
For 13 years I took final year students to Berlin on a field class, starting in 1996. At the start of that period almost all the students could remember the events of November 1989, but steadily that personal connection to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism diminished. Today probably all my final year students were born in 1990 or 1991 - in other words when Germany was on the way to, or had already achieved, reunification.
Teaching 'contemporary' issues in Europe - which is what I do - it is tricky to identify what is 'contemporary' to my students. I have been marking projects they have submitted which have required them, in the case of one of the questions they can choose, to compare two ex-communist countries in terms of the ways in which national identity has been (re)affirmed since democratisation. Students can choose their own pairs of countries, and I have read some excellent discussions of the new geopolitical alignment of Estonia as opposed to Ukraine, or the fate of minority groups in the assertion of national identity in Romania as opposed to Bulgaria. But I am often surprised at the mis-conceptions students hold about recent history. A remarkable number seem to believe that all of Central Europe (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and so on) was actually part of the Soviet Union. Some seem to believe that the Czech Republic and Slovakia have always been separate states.
In another one of the possible topics (on citizenship and racism) there is a different problem. Despite my encouragement to get into internet sources, and a class exercise on major newspapers across the continent, many students stick with the academic literature. The result is that they neglect major recent speeches and events - such as Chancellor Angela Merkel's comments less than two years ago that in Germany multiculturalism has totally failed, or the deportation of gypsies from France to Romania. These things are not yet reflected in journal articles.
So I have two related problems. One is that many students are not aware of major past events within their own lifetimes. The second is that they don't read the news media to keep up to date with issues - or if they do they don't see them as relevant to academic tasks. Perhaps I need to do three things before I can successfully deliver my course on 'The Social Geography of Europe.' Firstly I need to remind myself of the age of the students and what they might remember and know. Secondly I need to find ways of filling in the gaps - which might lead to me teaching them contemporary history rather than contemporary geography. And thirdly I need to get them to follow political and social events, and to take them on board in their understanding. Context is everything in the social sciences, and without an appreciation of context we are lost.
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