Designed to provide a context for English teachers' deliberations on what they should be teaching, this paper provides excerpts from 21 news items pertaining to significant educational and social events and trends. The news items deal with a wide range of topics, including the back-to-the-basics movement; the trend toward state-mandated programs of minimal-competency testing; recent findings about functional illiteracy among young adults; indications of a waning national commitment to the education of minorities; continuing discrimination suffered by blacks and other minority groups; issues related to career education; recent increases in the number of children whose families fall below the poverty line; and facts that point up the need to teach students about the urgent problems facing the world today. (GW)