KEEP SHAKESPEARE, DROP TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
By all means make room for new voice long ignored, but don’t bump the Bard of Avon
As we get into back-to-school mode, it’s curious to think that there are people who are against teaching Shakespeare in high schools.
What is the relevance of the writings of an old white man who has been dead for 400 years? Why does he continue to take up so much space in the curriculum?
At least some of these objections are born from the desire to make room for more contemporary writers, newer voices that have been ignored by the education establishment. Not hard to agree with that.
The anti-Shakespeare argument has resurfaced recently with legitimate questions about why there is so little Indigenous literature available to students. Again, hard to disagree.
Questioning is one thing, but I fail to see why anyone would want to eliminate Shakespeare, the most important voice in the history of English literature, in an effort to bring forward the forgotten and the overlooked? Out with the old and in with the new?
My own relationship with Shakespeare began in a Catholic high school in the mid-1960s. Classes were not yet mixed. In Grade 9, boys studied Julius Caesar, and girls read The Merchant of Venice. Apparently there was some kind of sexist logic to this. Frankly, I am surprised we didn’t have pink and blue classrooms. This we called education. Many years later, I taught mixed classes of Grade 11 English for six months at Pierrefonds Comprehensive High School. During much of that time, I taught Macbeth.
Four times a day, five days a week.
I knew it was too much when one of the students asked me: “Are you going to play all the parts again today, sir?”
That was the last time I ever taught high school.
Still later, I taught Macbeth to my senior English major students at Lanzhou University in northwest China. When they asked me why I chose Macbeth, I told them I thought it was something they would be able to relate to: Mao as Macbeth, Jiang Qing (Mrs. Mao) as Lady Macbeth and Zhou Enlai as Banquo. Out, out damned Gang of Four. It was a bit of a stretch, but the themes of unbridled ambition and unhinged, ruthless demagoguery seemed, at least to me, something the students would be able to relate to. They were all still suffering the real-life aftershocks of the Cultural Revolution, something every one of the students had participated in to one extent or another.
It was hard going, to be sure. It is tough enough to teach Shakespeare to students whose first language is English, let alone students who had studied English for some years but never with a teacher who was a native speaker.
The outcome, however, was something wonderful to behold. The students thought Shakespeare was prescient in his understanding of contemporary Chinese leaders. When we finished the play, most of them agreed that Macbeth was all too familiar.
My children both attended Royal West Academy in Montreal, where the teaching of Shakespeare has always been a major component of the curriculum. And not just teaching it as literature, but teaching it as drama — by far the best way to appreciate the plays.
Their participation in the mounting of those plays was a highlight of both their educations.
In their case, my children were lucky enough to have a charismatic and devoted teacher, Doug Floen, who, over the course of a 40-year-plus career, has almost single-handedly kept the Shakespeare flame alive by his tireless efforts to involve all his students in the production of the plays, on stage and back.
More’s the pity that all schools don’t have a Mr. Floen.
If I were looking to rattle the curriculum in the interests of the new and ignored, I think I would start with getting rid of the most over-taught novel ever, To Kill a Mockingbird. While it might have some merit, it remains somebody else’s story.
Rather, open up the doors and the covers, and let students discover works like those of the late Richard Wagamese, whose novel, Indian Horse, is our story.
Let’s not forget, however, that Shakespeare’s stories are everyone’s.