J.B. Priestley’s celebrated work, “An Inspector Calls”, lives on today as it is being taught in schools across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. It would be interesting to know if Priestley himself ever envisaged that his work would have such an enduring impact. This is the first in a series of blogs devoted to this classic, which is to help students to understand it better and thus help them in their GCSE exams and school work, but also to help teachers as well to teach it more effectively.

Why?

English literature is rich and replete with all sorts of classics and great writers, so why study this particular work. Often people who know ‘why’ something is being studied can gain some sort of ease in either the benefit of studying it or the wider context, and thus feel more engaged. So how can a teacher get his students to engage with the text perhaps even prior to studying it?

Here are some questions, activities or anecdotes that can help a teacher to stimulate interest in ‘An Inspector Calls’ (which will now be referred to as ‘AIC’):

1. Should only a rich person be allowed to be prime minister or headteacher?
2. Should people who are “too tall” (you can discuss what is “too tall”) be banned from certain jobs, is that fair?
3. Should people only be allowed to marry when they are 21?

All these questions in some way pertain to a certain category of people not being allowed to do something based on either their socio-economic status as in question one, their physicality in question two and their age in question three.

Question one can allow a debate to start about the poor and rich in society and to talk about socio-economic inequality and disparity. Question two might get some students to engage in some banter in the classroom about how tall or short student X or Y is, and it might be useful to mention that one previous prime minister of Britain (Johnn Major) was “banned” from being a bus conductor due to “being too tall”, he later on went to become leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world! Question three relates to age issues which is also a theme in ‘AIC’.

Priestley’s work is in fact all about various types of discrimination including that based on socio-economic class, gender, age and so on. Whilst Dickens also produced works focusing on poverty and social injustice, ‘AIC’ is closer both in time and in social conditions to our own current reality. A student who after perhaps having a passionate or stimulating discussion about various types of discrimination and who may even hear or narrate stories of various forms of discrimination they have witnessed or been exposed to might then see the play through the lens of social justice merely as just a “play/text I have to read in school” and which then might help them to prepare them for the GCSE questions about the themes of the play more effectively.

In the next article I will write about the play and its themes. Please feel free to leave your thoughts and comment below.

Thank you.