BANISH SHAKESPEARE, AND WE BANISH ALL THE WORLD
Instead of blaming the world’s finest writer, blame schools for making him boring
To teach Shakespeare, or not to teach Shakespeare.
That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of an outrageous survey. Or to take arms against a sea of knottypated fools — of the same sort who decided it was a good idea to name a polar research ship Boaty McBoatface.
“There exists a strong desire for the removal of Shakespeare as a required author,” concludes a new report from Alberta Education released this week in response to a new curriculum survey launched last October by Education Minister David Eggen. A strong desire?
That which education bureaucrats call “strong” by any other name would be extremely dubious.
On Thursday, after I poked and prodded Alberta Education, they finally conceded that of the 25,000 people who completed the survey, 60 added their own comments about Shakespeare. Of those, 50 called for the removal of Shakespeare from the curriculum. Alberta Education is interpreting that to mean five out of six people favour removing Shakespeare from the mandatory curriculum. (Make of that what you will.)
So quick bright things come to confusion. It would be a comedy of errors, if it weren’t an intellectual tragedy. Fie upon’t, foh, I say.
And pish.
William Shakespeare is the finest writer ever to wield English. His stories, his characters, his language belong to everyone. Right now, Shakespeare is only mandatory in two classes — English 20-1 and English 30-1, the academic streams of Grade 11 and Grade 12. Students who are bound for post-secondary education must study just two works of Shakespeare in their school careers. The real shame is that we don’t teach more Shakespeare, and earlier.
Shakespeare’s moral themes are universal. His poetry is sublime. And his plays are wickedly fun. They have sword fights and battles and shipwrecks and clowns and sex. There are monsters and witches and ghosts and twins. We revel in Shakespeare, not because he’s good for us, like kale or yoga, but because his plays have crackerjack plots full of suspense and passion and wit.
Good teachers don’t leach the joy out of them by forcing kids to do nothing but dissect diction and imagery. Good teachers bring Shakespeare alive with projects and puppet shows and staged readings. They show movie adaptations. They take field trips to see live productions. They help students see that all the world’s a stage.
We shouldn’t teach Shakespeare because he’s “traditional” or because he’s some old white man beloved by the Establishment. Shakespeare was no intellectual snob. He wasn’t elitist. He wrote for a popular audience. And he’d be properly horrified of our brave new world to think we are trying to embalm him or treat him like literary cod liver oil.
Why did people, unprompted, tell Alberta Education to banish Shakespeare from core curriculum?
In time we hate that which we often fear.
Maybe some of the people have bad memories of studying Shakespeare with a dull teacher. Shakespeare intimidates them — and so they dislike him in turn.
And clearly, some want teachers to spent time teaching utilitarian “language arts” lessons. The survey report says many people want students to focus on “texts” such as business letters, resumes, and emails — 46 per cent of those surveyed wanted keyboarding skills taught in kindergarten or Grade 1. But measure for measure, Shakespeare can teach more about professional writing than a zillion classes in spelling and typing — and more about coping with adult life than a zillion classes in “career and life management.”
Banish Shakespeare, and banish all the world.
The fault, dear readers, is not in our Bard but in our schools, that we are making Shakespeare boring.
Whiles others fish with craft for great opinion, I with great truth catch mere simplicity. Shakespeare is ours. And we’d rob all our children of joy and laughter and imagination — not to mention foundational cultural literacy — if we replaced him with business-writing seminars.
But is all this toil and trouble much ado about nothing? Eggen is a former English teacher. His staff assure me he has no plan to kick Juliet and Hamlet and Bottom to the curb. Let’s hope this report is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Let’s hope it struts and frets its hour upon the stage — and then is heard no more.