[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by ebusinesstutor

Wow, some intriguing discussion here.

I think the focus on education is wrong. I believe the focus should be to create confident, creative, lifelong learners with excellent research, work habits and good social skills and a balanced approach to life and career.

Fair enough, but I don't think you can create these individuals without giving them a real education. It's hard to be creative when you don't know anything.

We no longer teach our children to chip hand axes out of flint so perhaps teaching 16th century playwrights, no matter how wonderful their writing was, is also something to be set aside.

We don't teach our children to make handaxes because there are better alternatives available - like Grunfors axes from high carbon steel.

We still teach Shakespeare because there are not yet any better alternatives. David Weber might be easier to read, but he's not Shakespeare.

Certainly a course on important writers in English history would include him, but not something everyone needs to learn about.

Yes they do.

I would rather see school children learn how to write, direct, act in and produce their own play for the web. These creative skills are ones that they can use in their future careers.

Unless they have a decent background in playwriting, they will just produce feel-good garbage. That's not real creativity. Nor is putting on a play at school as part of an assignment particularly creative.

Creative, adaptable people are more successful and happy than "well-educated" people who do not continue to learn and adapt once they have finished their formal schooling.

You are begging the question. It is much more likely that people who are well-educated will continue to learn and adapt once they've finished formal schooling because they will have a much more substantial foundation to build upon. There's no such thing as creativity in a vacuum, and you can't be truly creative unless you have a real basis of knowledge.

And I'm also skeptical that schools can even teach creativity and adaptability.

Creative adaptable people can always look up or research any topic and can adapt to changing circumstances.

They can only do this if they have some basis to build upon. And I still see no evidence that reading Shakespeare won't lead to creative, adaptable people.

These are the people who create businesses when they are laid off and the authors who self publish when old, staid publishing houses turn up their nose at their manuscripts.

These are the people who change the world. And many of them will find Shakespeare because curiosity is one of these success traits.

Of course, it's a lot easier to actually read Shakespeare if you've been exposed to the language in high school and had to work through it.

I don't see the world being changed by uneducated people. And I don't think that substituting something else for Shakespeare in HS is more likely to make people creative or adaptable.