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Should Shakespeare still be taught in school?

Should Shakespeare still be taught in school?


  • Total voters
    42
  • Poll closed .
See? We wouldn't even have that line if we didn't study the Bard.

to tell you the truth, without music, art, and literature, i don't see the point in much of anything else.

The purpose of poetry is to tell us about life.

Jared Carter
 
I think it should, I read both Hamlet and Macbeth and they are 2 very impressive books/plays. The wranglings of the royal court in Hamlet is comparable to how politics works in a lot of country, with deceit, lies and traps.
 
One of the top ten reasons I continue to work to send my grandchildren to private school. They are btw, well read.
I shouldn't have to lay it on with a trowel, but if you expect Shakespeare to interest your grandchildren, then more fool you. I'd send all those private schoolteachers packing. I can't understand why some people think Shakespeare is the be-all and end-all.
 
to tell you the truth, without music, art, and literature, i don't see the point in much of anything else.

The purpose of poetry is to tell us about life.

Jared Carter



They do make the world a much more interesting and beautiful place, to be sure. Even the most primitive of peoples have their versions.
 
I don't think most people realize the impact Shakespeare has had on the English language. He invented hundreds upon hundreds of the words we use in everyday speaking. His work played a part in the language finally being formalized.

To this day his work influences literature and music and cinema. He is as relevant as he ever was.
 
I shouldn't have to lay it on with a trowel, but if you expect Shakespeare to interest your grandchildren, then more fool you. I'd send all those private schoolteachers packing. I can't understand why some people think Shakespeare is the be-all and end-all.

This is your great loss.

Some can't understand why people still listen to Bach either.
 
I shouldn't have to lay it on with a trowel, but if you expect Shakespeare to interest your grandchildren, then more fool you. I'd send all those private schoolteachers packing. I can't understand why some people think Shakespeare is the be-all and end-all.

Yeah, thanks for perfectly illustrating a would you like fries with that education. Btw, my grandchildren have read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and when they were little I used to read them the Canterbury Tales. They love it.
 
I read Greek mythology as a little kid, and so did my kids. Enduring tales, and as I watch two young crape myrtles that I mistakenly planted too close to each other begin to grow together, I think of Baucis and Philomen.
 
I shouldn't have to lay it on with a trowel, but if you expect Shakespeare to interest your grandchildren, then more fool you. I'd send all those private schoolteachers packing. I can't understand why some people think Shakespeare is the be-all and end-all.

This is your great loss.

Some can't understand why people still listen to Bach either.

I think Anglo was being ironic. :)
 
Yeah, thanks for perfectly illustrating a would you like fries with that education. Btw, my grandchildren have read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and when they were little I used to read them the Canterbury Tales. They love it.

You realize every sentence in Anglo's post was Shakespearean.
 
Absolutely. They are timeless classics. The problem is that teachers can either inspire the stories to be told or have them reduced to mere grammatical excursions.

Having the language barrier is difficult enough, but removing the human element from it does far greater damage.
 
I shouldn't have to lay it on with a trowel, but if you expect Shakespeare to interest your grandchildren, then more fool you. I'd send all those private schoolteachers packing. I can't understand why some people think Shakespeare is the be-all and end-all.

Well played, sir.
 
I largely agreed with the article, but I was slightly turned off by the author's early insistence that aides are denigrating to the play. Then I noticed it was declared fine when the page was split in half; with the original text and the rough modern translation side-by-side.

I know it must be insulting to the acquainted that his work requires a great deal of translating with each passing generation, but there's no need for that sort of resistance.

We have no qualms giving university students companion volumes or even graphic novel-inspired summaries of a theorist's concepts. And why should we? If something is difficult to comprehend, regardless of attempts to directly traverse the language barrier, go around it. At the end of the day, you want them to understand the concepts and what is going on. If they can't do that, it matters not that it sounds like silk.

If you want to uphold the sanctity of the written and spoken word, do so with academics and university pupils. With children and adolescents, get them to respect the story.
 
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How do you propose to teach an English literature class without including Shakespeare at least in passing? :roll:
I've had short shrift for Shakespeare for a long time now. You can have too much of a good thing.
 
Surely not of the Queen's English.
 
I largely agreed with the article, but I was slightly turned off by the author's early insistence that aides are denigrating to the play. Then I noticed it was declared fine when the page was split in half; with the original text and the rough modern translation side-by-side.

I know it must be insulting to the acquainted that his work requires a great deal of translating with each passing generation, but there's no need for that sort of resistance.

We have no qualms giving university students companion volumes or even graphic novel-inspired summaries of a theorist's concepts. And why should we? If something is difficult to comprehend, regardless of attempts to directly traverse the language barrier, go around it. At the end of the day, you want them to understand the concepts and what is going on. If they can't do that, it matters not that it sounds like silk.

If you want to uphold the sanctity of the written and spoken word, do so with academics and university pupils. With children and adolescents, get them to respect the story.
I agree with this post. If teachers are genuinely interested in Shakespeare, and have some teaching expertise, then they can make Shakespeare accessible, fun and educational for children.

I think anyone learning Shakespeare should first get their head round the storyline by watching films and reading a modern translation. Then, you can delve into the detail, secure that you know the context. It's the same with foreign languages - coursebooks introduce context first before wading into language.

If there is a lack of interest in teaching Shakespeare from English teachers, then that's the problem. If they can't make it interesting for students of average aptitude, then it's not the material which is at fault, but the teaching methods and course design.
 
Shakespeare certainly has its place in a high school English classroom.

However, I do think that there's a trend in many English classes to focus too heavily on "the classics". There's a world of excellent modern literature out there that it seems like many English teachers completely ignore..
 
Yes, of course.

I think Dana Dusbiber's a dummy, and I was delighted several days ago to read this reader comment by "streiff" at Red State:

One of the bywords of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s when it his college campuses was “relevance.” Students, it was claimed, had the ability to decide what was “relevant” to them and to disregard the rest. What it boiled down to was two generations of history majors who never had to memorize dates and English majors who were never required to learn grammar. Now we see this effect in high school classrooms where teachers are deciding, based on skin color, what material their students should learn and what is too difficult to master.

Once one gets past the utter racism of this point of view and the condescension that says history-began-about-the-time-I-started-high-school — and slack-jawed wonder at the thought a very white-bread, progressive teacher teaching “oral tradition out of Africa” apparently without a text, because oral tradition — we see a nihilism, a Jacobinism, so familiar in the cultural left since Robespierre and his cronies jettisoned the calendar and converted churches into “temples of reason.” We are witnessing a belief that nothing that happened at any point in the past is relevant or useful and that personal testimony is more powerful than millenia of collective human experience.

While Ms. Dusbiber is patting herself on the back at her wisdom in deciding that race makes literature relevant, she is also hamstringing every one of her students by sending them into the world with the view that nothing is significant but their own experiences. They will dumber and, in the long run, poorer for having sat in her classroom.

English teacher: why study Shakespeare? He's a dead white guy | RedState

There's far too much to comment on from my mere phone.

I agree with the writer that it is ridiculous to boil everything down to an insulting level of direct relevance. However, it should be considered. Furthermore, it's not nihilism, but rather an exaggerated leftist utilitarianism or sheer leftist anti-Westernism.

While I wouldn't advocate killing the dead white man in order to replace him with a living woman of color (if opposites were applied), I find oral traditions utterly fascinating. It brings up a much needed dialogue about the relationship between speaker and audience and associated acts between writer and the reader, and most importantly, authority. Likewise, if you apply that to historical memory, you get to take eager young minds deep into the rabbit hole. Alessandro Portelli showed us how it works.

As for history majors and date memorizing, I'm afraid that the writer in question doesn't seem so acquainted with the field of history. The 1960s and 1970s were about the rising tide of social history and cultural study courses as opposed to the established political histories or even the Marxists and their fascination with economics. Even in the midst of the academic culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, there wasn't much pining from historians that students aren't memorizing dates. Rather, the arguments dealt with perspective (social history vs political history, largely) the ability to declare something or another a "fact," or whether we had become too bogged down in linguistic fetishism upheld by the post-structuralists. Date memorization wasn't a focus because it's not a focus and arguably hasn't been since Herodotus. I haven't really read a single historical classic that stressed dates or even a worthwhile commentary from historians that were bemoaning the loss of date memorization. It was always our methods, our perspectives, and political identity.
 
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The usual, ‘ . . . that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students," she argued.’
Shakespeare and Dickens, or the giants of American literature such as Twain, Steinbeck and Hemmingway . . . Swop those for how to text speak and how to communicate in ebonics? No contest! Part of the continuing dumbing down, it always starts with the children.
 
Thanks - I enjoyed that!

for you :mrgreen:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
 
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