Do UK Schools Come To Praise Shakespeare, Or To Bury Him..?

But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
__Othello, Act 3, Scene 3

Maybe it's a sign of how hard it is today to sustain our faith for a better Europe, but when I hear of government bodies called the "Department for Children" deciding to "improve" the approach to the teaching of Shakespeare in British schools, I immediately think the worst.

Especially when I hear affirmations of "engaging the texts" in order to place them within a "wider cultural context":

Shakespeare will be ditched from secondary school tests under plans being considered by ministers, it emerged yesterday.

Teenagers would no longer sit formal tests on the country's most renowned playwright under a shake-up of English Sats for 14-year-olds.

They would instead be assessed by their teachers on their understanding of the plays after performing them and studying their 'wider cultural context'.
...
The Department for Children said it had not yet taken firm decisions on the direction of Shakespeare assessment for 14-year-olds.
...
New-style Sats tests being trialled in 400 schools with a view to nationwide introduction from 2010 do not include a Shakespeare section. Instead, the Government has produced new materials to help teachers assess pupils' understanding of the Bard without the use of tests.

'These tasks, which are currently under development, will encourage lively and active approaches to Shakespeare that engage with the text as something to be performed; involve the study of the whole play; and consider Shakespeare in a wider cultural and literary context,' a spokesman said. ...

So far, on the surface, this sounds ominous and dreadful, easily conjuring up images of students being turned off of Shakespeare, thinking his work might be less than it really is. Yet: like so much else in life, it’s a matter of principle, not rule; not merely **what** something is, but **how it is** what it is. What if, for once, the proposed new approach was a first step towards something better, rather than one more step towards something worse.

I put myself in the position of the parents whose children attend these schools, and I wonder what I would accept as a tipping point, where exposing them to Shakespeare in school, in the manner that it’s being done, might actually be the greater, not the lesser, of evils. If the current approach is so counter-productive that it destroys the student’s appreciation for the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, maybe this work should be released from the little boxes that bureaucrats would encase it within, in order to try out some new approaches, taking better advantage of new technologies, to see what might result. I suspect, from anecdotal evidence, we have little to lose in the experiment...

By coincidence, I recently had a talk with a young lady at work who’s fresh from high school, and she rolled her eyes at the recounting of the stupidity that surrounded her school’s approach to teaching literature in general, and Shakespeare in particular. Her school's "official" approach resulted in killing her whole interest in reading itself, to the point where she views reading novels, poems and plays as a waste of time. And frankly, I don’t blame her, she was a good student of the lessons she was really being taught by the way in which this material was presented to her; I would feel no different, if that was all that I had seen of the world of letters. Sad to say, but I wonder if she would probably be better off being illiterate, so that she would still have her sense of wonder about what she was missing when she would come upon a closed book. Instead, the way in which the material was presented to her produced an alliterate: someone who can read, but chooses not to do so, deciding from her previous school experience that there is nothing to be gained by reading books. A mind closed to opening closed books.

To my frustration my young co-worker learned her lesson so well that I haven’t yet found the words to convince her to think a second time about her current conclusion; I’ve tried to come up with many a metaphor to describe what she’s missing, just to shift her belief first, then her knowledge second, but nothing has yet broken through. Of course, I could just shrug my shoulders and say, well it’s not my problem, thank goodness, I’m not her parents… but there seems to be something so deeply sinful about robbing someone of a love of reading, that I want to keep trying.

(Without becoming counter-productive in my own right, and cement her within her current disinterest about reading!)

She likely needs almost as many years out of school, as she spent in school, to undo the damage that was done... So when I hear that abandoning "official" tests would result in the following as a substitute, I find myself somewhat encouraged. Back to the Daily Mail account:

...
But teachers continue to claim they have led to pupils studying scenes in isolation and tackling 'laughable' questions sometimes unrelated to the plays, and are certain to welcome the proposed changes.
The Department for Children said pupils would still have to study two Shakespeare plays at secondary school.
'The teacher-assessed tasks that will be trialled from September will provide assessable written outcomes, with the option to supplement this with oral evidence,' he said.
'The tasks are still under development and their future has not been decided.
'We are simply exploring new, innovative and exciting ways of teaching and assessing Shakespeare.'
Under the Government's Shakespeare strategy, the Bard will be taught to children as young as six thanks to new teaching packs being sent to primary schools which include abridged film versions of his plays.
Children will begin preparatory studies in nursery classes.
More children will be taken on theatre visits and schools will be encouraged to stage Shakespeare productions.

If a student was to study Shakespeare's plays by a combination of actually watching them being performed and by reading the actual plays, rather than by simply reading about them, maybe the power of the plays themselves can be entrusted to do more of their own teaching, touching young minds and lighting new flames in a new generation... maybe trusting the work more, trusting the school system less, might be the lesser of evils and result in students teaching themselves why we regard William Shakespeare so highly.

Macbeth:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:

Therein the patient

Must minister to himself.

__Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3

[Hat tip to Eowyn at Shooting Star for this story]

Exercising with Dartagnan

Tiberge at Galliawatch laments the lack of good French literature in recent times, and I wonder if a lack of good books goes hand in hand with a lack of reading good books.

To sit down, hour after hour, curled up with a good book, our mind getting a workout from the ideas contained on each page, exercised to hold in the eye of our imagination so much detail, and so many emotions… this is a physical skill. It is an athletic skill, requiring the focus that any athlete would appreciate in engaging their tasks of physical strength.

I remember fondly the summer I discovered Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers – an unabridged version, in the children’s section of the library no less! – and spent many an hour, in-between street hockey, tree climbing and bike riding, learning about life alongside Dartagnan. Count of Monte Cristo awaited me next, and from the adult section of the same library I located the sequels to The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and Man in the Iron Mask.

It took conditioning of the sort any athlete would recognize, to build up the muscles of the mind to the point that a kid would have the incentive to plough through such heavy books. Like any good athlete, we warmed up, we started small, and worked our way up. I remember believing it was important to read books a little bit beyond oneself, a push I encountered later in gym class, each time instructors dutifully asked us for one more set of sit ups, when we were convinced our stomachs would burst from the effort.

How to inspire the young of today to pick up an Ivanhoe, a Gulliver’s Travels, a Robinson Crusoe, how to motivate the young to pick up and persevere through any one of the classics lying unread in the children’s sections of libraries? How to condition the soul of the young to want to pursue the physical task that is part of one's exploration of the infinite complexity of the motivations that can breathe life into our otherwise empty shells?
How to convince them they need to be doing this?

The goal of an amateur athlete’s exercise regimen isn’t so much “to win”, as it is to “be in shape”. The goal from reading isn’t so much to have ideas, but more to be able to think.

The obesity of body that is so quickly lamented in the national press is surely outmatched by its intellectual equivalent, a softness of minds grown more flaccid than any muscle hanging off the bones. An inability to think…

How to stimulate the mind of the young to read more, so as to exercise their “muse”, when the competition for such exercises are a-musements (meaning, literally, “taking the thinking/muse out of a thing”) like these..?



After this kind of workout, who has the muscle to still walk with Dartagnan..?

Reading too much into new survey on books..?

Some sobering news from an AP-Ipsos poll cited by Yahoo today: "One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year..."

The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.
...
Who are the 27 percent of people the AP-Ipsos poll found hadn't read a single book this year? ... They tend to be older, less educated, lower income, minorities, from rural areas and less religious.

I'm not sure what to make of this poll, from using my own personal experience as a guide. I spend as much time reading books as I ever have, but I notice that I **finish** reading far fewer books than at any previous point in my life.

Nowadays, perhaps as a result of prolonged internet exposure, I find that I tend to target specific chapters of books and limit myself to those, instead of working through books in their entirety anymore. I read only to learn, to expand my understanding of my world; I can't recall cracking open too many novels since 9-11... my love of fiction was one of the smaller casualties of that attack. I probably "read" fifty to sixty books last year (as Dag can attest from seeing me lugging them to our weekly meetings), but finished, cover to cover, only the same paltry number as the average man listed in this poll.
How would that be acknowledged if I had participated in this survey? Would I be slanting the numbers upward... or down?

I read the Bible; not as often as I believe I should, but still fairly frequently. I read it yet I don't even really think about reading it cover to cover, not seeing it as that kind of book.
How might that be measured by this survey?

...[T]hose who said they never attend religious services read nearly twice as many as those who attend frequently. ...
The Bible and religious works were read by two-thirds in the survey, more than all other categories. ...

It's tempting to strike a cynical pose, and proclaim the raw numbers of the poll a fitting destination for a civilization growing ever more ungrateful and indifferent to the treasure it has accumulated through so many previous generations' commitment to progress. It's tempting to say that, but maybe we're all so doggone busy trying to add to this bounty, or committed to safeguard it, for the sake of the next generation, that reading habits are undergoing only a temporary shift in our priorities.

Are books themselves undergoing a similarly temporary fluctuation? Are they destined to perpetually shrink in size, with the ideas contained within them similarly simplified, to suit the curtailed attention span for those ideas? Or is that simplification a useful discipline, to ensure we are really clear about what we are trying to communicate to each other? Are books retreating to some equivalent of pamphlet size, waiting for a time where they may grow again as technological innovation reduces the traditional costs of printing and distributing them?

What fate lies in store for us, if we are indeed becoming, as the survey seems to suggest, an alliterate society, one capable of reading but choosing not to? Are we destined to become, not so much a fracture of "haves" and "have nots", but rather a division based on "can" and "can't do"? One group, benefiting from the training they unknowingly receive through their reading, capable of imagining different, learned, patterns of behavior to aim for? Is that group going to emerge as the only percentage with the ability to imagine the leading role that the individual can play in their own self-betterment? Will the choice not to read leave the other group, the alliterates, possessing no comparable faith in their ability to act as agents of change in their own lives..?

Maybe an alliterate world is one in which change (in the form of progress, not deterioration) becomes less common... which promises to make it a more dreadful curse than one filled with illiteracy, where at least there's an ability to see the unseen; the poor illiterate can look at a book and know he's missing something, can imagine what it might be, and may hunger to acquire it.
Would that leave the illiterate as having more faith in human progress than the alliterate, who may look at the same book and judge himself rich enough that he doesn't need to read the wealth of knowledge that may lie within?
In such a world, who then would truly be the poor one?