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]

More polite, smart, well-behaved teenagers on the horizon

Some good news in the world, for a change: Homeschool numbers increase

... In 1999, according to federal statistics, there were 850,000 home-schooled children in the United States. In 2003, that number rose to 1.1 million. Some estimates put the figure today as high as 2.4 million.

"It's certainly on the rise, there's no doubt about it," said Brad Haines, executive director for the Missouri-based Families for Home Education. "Exactly how fast is up to speculation."

Before their four children were born, Kim and her husband, David, decided they were going to home-school them. They had the most common reasons for doing so: They wanted an alternative to the sometimes violent culture of American public schools, and they wanted to educate their children with a Bible-centered focus.

"People always ask me, 'Why do you want to stay home with your kids?'" Perry said. "I tell them, they're my kids. I want to have a positive impact on them. I want to raise them according to my values not someone else's."
...
Regina Morin, director of admissions at Columbia College, says the school is seeing more home-schoolers apply each year. "They tend to be better than their public school counterparts," she said. "They score above average on tests, they're more independent, they're often a grade ahead."

"Why do you want to stay home with your kids?" I hope this question is not coming from other parents. Although, that would go a long way to explain all the messed up kids out there; if their own parents don't want to be around them, who else would..? What teacher would? If a parent acts as if their child was a curse to them, why wouldn't the child believe themselves to be unworthy of improvement?

I've tried to keep an eye on the growing trend of homeschooling since I first started meeting homeschooled teenagers a few years ago. To date, making their acquaintance has remained a uniformly inspiring experience. They are so well-mannered, respecful and well-spoken. Particularly admirable is their curiosity; they seem to have developed learning into a habit, an itch always in need of a scratch. I'm sure there must be ill-served homeschooled children somewhere in North America; people are people, some good and some not so much. Nevertheless I've yet to meet any homeschooled young person who didn't impress me mightily. And really make my day.

If we are ever blessed with children, we both hope to be able to have them home-schooled, for as long as we can manage it, as our preference.

Seems as if we're in good, and growing, company.

(With thanks to the blog Why Homeschool, one of my favorite places to visit when looking for good news)

Public schools do a great job... at teaching kids to be Stupid

This is a 2006 news piece by John Stossel, from ABC's 20/20.
From the description posted at Youtube:

20-20 investigation by John Stossel entitled "Stupid in America" highlighting some of the flaws with the education system in the United States. The story started out when identical tests were given to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid", which gave the piece its name.

Here are some lines that stuck with me as the program went on:

Stossel: "The longer American kids spend in schools, the worse they do."
Grandmother: "The children are not stupid; the system is stupid."
Mother: "My son is now 18, and he is not reading. He is on a fourth grade level."
[Stossel takes her kid and puts him in the hands of a private learning center: "After only 72 hours of instruction he is raised two grade levels."]
Belgian mother: "I wouldn't send my child to an American public school, not even for a million dollars."
American Student: "One of my teachers tells me he does this for the health benefits."
Stossel: "In the last two years, only two teachers [who are members of the New York state teachers union] have been fired for incompetence."





It's a long piece (40+ minutes) but well worth watching if you can spare the time. Just make sure you watch it early enough in the day, so that you can use the anger and sense of outrage it provokes to good purpose, and take action. If you watch it in the evening, you'll only toss and turn and get no sleep [he says, bleary-eyed from experience].
God help our children who have fallen prey to the povertarian ideals of the teachers unions and their governmental enablers. (and, to be fair, the indifference of those parents who shrug their shoulders in the face of evidence such as this program provides)

Europe's war on Home Schooling and "school phobia"

Paul Belien, of the Brussels Journal, writes an editorial this week at The Washington Times on the war against Home-schooling underway in Europe, and particularly in Germany:

2007 German Horror Tale

Earlier this month, a German teen-ager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home schooled.

On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from "school phobia."

Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools. … Only some 500 children are being home-schooled in a country of 80 million.
...
All German political parties, including the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Angela Merkel, are opposed to home-schooling. They say that "the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be tampered with." The home-schoolers receive no support from the official (state funded) churches, either. These maintain that home-schoolers "isolate themselves from the world" and that "freedom of religion does not justify opposition against the obligation to attend school."
...
Hermann Stucher, a pedagogue who called upon Christians to withdraw their children from the state schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of "neo-Marxist activists," has been threatened with prosecution for "Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung" (high treason and incitement of the people against the authorities). The fierceness of the authorities' reaction is telling. The dispute is about the hearts and minds of the children. In Germany, schools have become vehicles of indoctrination, where children are brought up to unquestioningly accept the authority of the state in all areas of life.
...
The situation is hardly better at the European level. Last September, the European Court of Human Rights supported Hitler's 1938 schooling bill. The Strasburg-based court, whose verdicts apply in the entire European Union, ruled that the right to education "by its very nature calls for regulation by the State." It upheld the finding of German courts: "Schools represent society, and it is in the children's interest to become part of that society. The parents' right to educate does not go so far as to deprive their children of that experience."

While it is disquieting that Europeans have not learned the lessons from their dictatorial past — upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including children, to
psychiatric wards, as the Soviets used to do — there is reason for Americans to worry, too. The United Nations is also restricting the rights of parents. Article 29 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that it is the goal of the state to direct the education of children.
In Belgium, the U.N. Convention is currently being used to limit the constitutional right to home-school. In 1995 Britain was told that it violated the U.N. Convention by allowing parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes.