Mother Courage

MOTHER COURAGE

The education system has always tried to figure out new ways of teaching certain matters of interest, like history, where there are many points to be discuss that can be left out by authors. Text books do not fill everything that should be filled, and it is impossible to do so because there are too many things to tell and not enough space to write. There is also the fact that every professor wants to give his or her own approach to the topic, and sometimes there is not one source that tells everything the way he or she wants. At that point lectures become more and more important and those are only to be complemented with text of a variety of styles. Those sources were not initially designed to fill that requirement, but with the right approach and background information those new sources can be even better than any textbook any written. These kinds of sources give a different approach to history and can be more enjoyable than boring textbooks. On the other hand, these variety of sources can also been incorrectly chosen and may difficult the learning process for students. Sometimes sources are not efficient transmitting the message that wants to be transmitted, and students can simply not understand beyond the history that is been told. For instance Mother Courage and Her Children, by Bertolt Brecht, it’s a story that occurs during the Thirty Years War in Europe, and can be used to help students understand this war. Is this play a good source for understanding the Thirty Years War? Or it only stays in the basic story with minimum helpful information that would help understand this event.

The Thirty Years war was caused mainly by the protestant reformation, a process caused by the split of the Catholic Church. It was all because of the lack of tolerance and the extremist ways of thought of people. In this area for example, the play is not as deep an as informative as desired, it stays only in the basics and mentioning Catholics and Protestants as rivals but it does not go deeper. “The Catholics! Surprise attack!.” “And the war is a war of religion.” It does mention Religion as a point of disagreement, but it fails to really explain that this entire situation is mainly caused by religious differences. As the world is right now, with all the polemic issues started by Iraq’s invasion by the United States and the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islam extremists, more described facts would be very useful.