Should high school students have to read Shakespeare?

[Nawpkin]

I don't agree that anyone should be forced to read anything. Being forced into something means you're not going to enjoy it or even care the day after what it was about.

[odiakkoh]

Originally Posted by Nawpkin

I don't agree that anyone should be forced to read anything. Being forced into something means you're not going to enjoy it or even care the day after what it was about.

Meh not always true. I was forced to read the great gatsby and the joy luck club for high school. Neither are books i wouldve ever picked up on my own but here we are almost ten years later and theyre still two of my favorite books.

[grumpy3b]

Originally Posted by Nawpkin

I don't agree that anyone should be forced to read anything. Being forced into something means you're not going to enjoy it or even care the day after what it was about.

and participation "trophies" for everyone while you are at it...it's called SCHOOL and people need to get past this laissez-faire attitude about education so kids can finally start developing some discipline for learning. If your kid does not like school and assigned required work then that is the fault of the parent not the school or the instructor.

[maianhvk]

Originally Posted by Nawpkin

I don't agree that anyone should be forced to read anything. Being forced into something means you're not going to enjoy it or even care the day after what it was about.

To force people to do things they don't want to, that's the school's business. Sometimes I think it's necessary though.

There's an old saying in my country:

Youngster reading books is like looking at the moon though the key hole.
Adult reading books is like watching the moon in the garden.
Elder reading books is like observing the moon on the tower.

There's a famous work in Vietnam, as well-known and considered classic, traditional to us as Shakespeare's works to English speakers. A long, long, long, long poem indeed, so long that I gave up reading and then, gave up skipping pages altogether that happened when I was 12. Now I simply love it, and think it's understandable that sometimes studying is obligatory.

How old are you, Nawpkin? Surely you know the moment when you realize that you like a work you did hate when you were forced to learn it in high school.

[DMB]

I am fascinated by this discussion. I am English, aged 71, and was first introduced to Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice) at school when I was 12. At that age, it was simply one of the inexplicable things that school made you do. I also had to study Macbeth and Richard II during the next two years. Then just before I was 15 I had changed countries, returned to England and was in the sixth form. English school education becomes very specialised quite young, and most students are restricted to only a few subjects at this stage. When I changed schools, I was forced to change my specialist subjects because (Shock! Horror!) I had been following a mixture of arts and sciences. The new school considered me to be primarily a mathematician, so I was shunted into doing a lot more maths and also physics. I had to give up French and art, which were the other subjects I was doing.

However, after a month or so, the headmistress called me in and said that I was in danger of becoming an illiterate scientist and was therefore to take up advanced-level English. I still don't think much of the way the school was run, but I am eternally grateful for that decision, which transformed my education. I gained a brilliant English teacher who could make anything we had to study come alive. In those days our syllabus didn't include anyone after Jane Austen and barely any 18th-century writers. It was firmly fixed on the 15th-17th centuries. But IMO that was good, because there is no doubt that Chaucer is harder to read and requires more help than, say, Dickens. And I was inspired to fill in the gaps in my own time. I even elected to do an A-level exam paper on George Bernard Shaw without any teaching at all.

One of our texts was Hamlet, which we had to study over two years in some depth.

All the time I was at school, I never saw a Shakespearean production apart from a simply terrible amateur Macbeth. But once I left school, I started going to see all sorts of plays. I think English people are very lucky to have an excellent theatrical tradition and it isn't difficult to track down professional productions of most Shakespeare plays. For many years I have gone to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and also to the National Theatre, where one can see competent and sometimes excellent versions of the plays.

Some Shakespeare plays I have seen only once, but many I have seen multiple times. What I find is that the text and the performances complement each other. Having studied Hamlet fairly intensively at school, I find it easier to get a great deal from the performances. But however many times I see it, I usually discover something new each time. And usually the performances send me back to the text.

For me, live performances are almost always better than films, even remarkable ones like Kenneth Branagh's marathon Hamlet. I have often enjoyed good amateur productions. There is a bond between audience and actors that cannot be reproduced in the more passive milieu of the cinema.

If films and video are all you have access to, then I certainly think for children at school they should be an essential part of the experience. When my son was doing his International Baccalaureate, his Language A subject, which was essentially world literature (in translation if necessary) included a number of plays: Death of Salesman, A Doll's House, Waiting for Godot and King Lear. One of his two English teachers was a bit of a zero, so I helped him with the syllabus. I was able to take him to excellent stage productions of all but King Lear, so for that we relied on videos. I must admit that for me Waiting for Godot seemed deadly boring on the page, but once I had seen a tip-tip production, it came alive and I could return to the text with renewed enthusiasm.

Now that I'm old, I go to see Shakespeare for enjoyment, not to accrue brownie points for erudition. But I had a French friend, now sadly dead, who was a genuine Shakespearian scholar. When I waxed enthusiastic about a performance I had just seen, he contended that only from the text could one experience the full depth of Shakespeare. He was greatly exercised by questions of variant texts and the physical resources of the Elizabethan theatre. I could only follow him in part. Who is to say which is the better position?

I second those who say that children should be helped to tackle difficult things. That's one of the main purposes of school IMO. I find, for example, that I have only the sketchiest understanding of chemistry, because I never studied it properly at school. I have never subsequently been sufficiently motivated to set aside time to study it.

Study of the classics can be very rewarding and is a way of putting one in contact with other cultures as well as one's own. I have gained great enjoyment from reading and seeing English-language productions of Ancient Greek plays. A single production of Le Tartuffe sent me to eager reading of Molière, who is still funny at least in parts. Similarly seeing a production of Phèdre in English translation sent me off to read the original French. I wish I had more languages so as to be able to sample great works in their original form.

School education in the end is no more than planting seeds for future learning. Some will geminate; others won't. But we should not give up trying.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Beautifully written post, DMB.

I've made it a point not to return to this thread since my last post, nor to read any responses to it, because I felt it was more important not to upset other members than it was to continue to argue my position. I only returned because I read one of your posts on another thread and enjoyed your thoughtfulness as much as the things you had to say.

Karma to you for this.

[carld]

I just read that nearly half of Detroit's adult population is functionally illiterate, despite nearly half of them having earned a high school diploma, I say the kids can't read enough, of anything and everything. By all means challenge them with Shakespeare, but don't ignore and pass on those who need help.

[straygator]

Cultural literacy arguments aside, and hopefully not covering old ground . . .

One of my semesters-from-hell in college featured an early Shakespeare class where we studied maybe four plays all term, with the professor parsing lines and walking us through multiple ways each play could be read. Same semester I had a vicious French grammar course with the same in-depth approach. Within a few weeks I hated both classes.

Then, about halfway through the semester, both courses clicked, as if someone had thrown an electric switch in my head. All the odd (to an American brain) French verb tenses, and the equally odd (to a 20th Century brain) words and turns of phrase in Shakespeare dovetailed. I could see traces of the French tenses and sentence construction in the plays, and could hear echoes of Shakespeare’s English in written and spoken French. Both classes made sense and, literally overnight, became my two favorites.

I was absolutely amazed to see so clearly how English had developed – from French to Shakespearean English, and from Shakespearean to modern English – simply from having those two courses together, taught by two hard-assed professors. That insight into how my native language works at the noun-verb-object and idiomatic levels was one of the greatest lessons of my college career. And one I still draw on today.

Yeah, Shakespeare can be difficult. But those old plays have a TON to offer – often in ways neither the student nor the teacher envisioned – if you take the time to really read them.

[emoorman]

I am a 73-year old engineer and former USAF pilot. I, too, hated reading Shakespeare, as well as English, psychology and all those other non-math or scientific courses. I always loved courses where there was a definite answer, rather than an opinion.

As I grew older and more mature, I came to understand the need for such courses and to be well rounded. That public speaking course I had many years ago came in handy when I needed to prepare and give a briefing. The same can be said for English and all the others.

I am now a firm believer in the "well rounded" education concept. And not just for engineers. I see no reason why liberal arts majors shouldn't take math beyond simple college algebra, or do they call it "pre-calculus math" these days. A little basic biology, chemistry and physics wouldn't hurt, either.

I feel the increase in technology means we need to broaden and increase our education requirements all up and down the line from elementary school to post graduate studies. If it means extending school an hour or two, so be it. I don't know why kids get out at 2:30 for anyway.

Enough of my rant. Keep the plays and other similar courses.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by straygator

I was absolutely amazed to see so clearly how English had developed – from French to Shakespearean English, and from Shakespearean to modern English –

English did not develop from French. It certainly gained a lot of French words following the Norman invasion, but Modern English (and Shakespeare was writing Modern English, by the way!) developed from Middle English, which, in turn, developed from Old English.

[caleb72]

I studied quite a bit of literature in my time - English classes throughout high school, English Literature classes in high school and French and German literature in University.

In many ways I don't think I'm representative of any majority as I think I had a particular fascination with language. Not just English and not just spoken - I also had a fascination with computer programming languages and mathematics, poetry and lyrics. I love expression of all sorts and have often used words like fluent and expressive when describing Python scripting on computers for example.

So with the small exception of Thomas Hardy (for some reason), I enjoyed everything I studied at school. I really liked Othello, Death in Venice, The Outsider (in English and in French), Medea, Lord of the Flies, Crime and Punishment, To Kill a Mockingbird, selected poetry by Blake, Eliot and Donne, Calculus, molecular equations, Latin literature, Pascal syntax and even the lyrics of church hymns etc...

However, I don't think I was the norm - at least in that school. People looked at me strangely when I equated computer programming to essay writing and Latin to mathematics. They just thought I was weird. They were probably right - but that's a different topic .

I think as I've grown older and connected with more people outside of a country boarding school I've realised that I'm not the weirdest person out there and indeed there may be more people that think the way I do than I had previously thought. Happy to see an increase in the population of freaks on this planet.

Anyway - this is just a bunch of "me me me" stuff I thought I'd write because I didn't have anything intelligent to say about the topic. I have been meaning to re-read Merchant of Venice and have it on my Kindle, but admittedly this is the first time since high-school that I've thought of going back to Shakespeare. I wonder what he delights he has for me after all this time.

Ramblingly yours,
Caleb

[DMB]

Originally Posted by HarryT

English did not develop from French. It certainly gained a lot of French words following the Norman invasion, but Modern English (and Shakespeare was writing Modern English, by the way!) developed from Middle English, which, in turn, developed from Old English.

I think it's more complicated than just gaining French vocabulary. Middle English is very different grammatically from Old English and is really a sort of creole.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DMB

I think it's more complicated than just gaining French vocabulary. Middle English is very different grammatically from Old English and is really a sort of creole.

Certainly it is; I'm not suggesting otherwise. The previous poster, though, was suggesting that English developed FROM French, and that's simply not true. English is a Germanic language; French a Romance language.

[straygator]

My bad. And nice catch. I should have written 'how French influenced English.' And for what it's worth, I gained similar insight reading Chaucer (yes, in Middle English, not Old or Modern English).

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Certainly it is; I'm not suggesting otherwise. The previous poster, though, was suggesting that English developed FROM French, and that's simply not true. English is a Germanic language; French a Romance language.

I've always loved Graves and Hodges for building the idiosyncrasies of the English language's history into their guide to writing it logically. Your comment about the French (i.e., Latinate) vocabulary suggests you might have read that book. If so, perhaps I'm not alone in admiring it.