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Should Shakespeare still be taught in school?

Should Shakespeare still be taught in school?


  • Total voters
    42
  • Poll closed .

SlevinKelevra

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Inspired by this:

Do students really need Shakespeare in 2015?: Red/Blue America | PennLive.com

The controversial Common Core state standards want students to read William Shakespeare's works, but some teachers don't like the idea.

Dana Dusbiber, a teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., wrote in the Washington Post this week that she dislikes teaching Shakespeare, and not only because of his challenging English. "There is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students," she argued.
:roll:
 
This is why we can't have nice things...
 
Could also explain why Luther Burbank has always had the rep of the worst high school in Sacto.
 
Of course. It is part of the heritage of Western Civilization. They should not only read Shakespeare, they should watch first-rank productions of his plays on video, like Kenneth Brannagh's Henry V, Polanski's MacBeth and Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet.

The language may be dated but there is timeless wisdom about the human condition in his plays.

Even some of the modernized versions, like the DeCaprio version of Romeo and Juliet, have virtue as a decendent of that legacy.


Kids need more than Xbox and SpongeBob to be acculturated adults.
 
We did all that when I was in High School.


I remember we were reading Hamlet in class; I was reading the part of Polonius. Everyone was reading kind of deadpan, which is boring. All the sudden it hit me just how pompous and convoluted Polonius' speech was and I cracked up and started laughing my head off.

Everybody looked at me as if I must be on drugs. :D

But then later, we were watching Hamlet on video, and some people did chuckle a bit at how Polonius was always going on and on like a broken record.


Actually one of my fonder memories of HS English, and the beginning of my lifelong appreciation for The Bard.
 
As a 27 year old white guy No. I could care less if he's taught. Absolutely no relevance to our society today at all.
 
As a 27 year old white guy No. I could care less if he's taught. Absolutely no relevance to our society today at all.

case in point for the thread?




Anyways, his works are the foundation of pretty much every bit of English composition since, and his works have been adapted and retold (some , to be fair aren't that original to begin with) countless times over. To say it has no relevance is to basically say English literature should not be studied. I'd be curious to hear more specific explanation of why you think so?
 
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
 
As a 27 year old white guy No. I could care less if he's taught. Absolutely no relevance to our society today at all.

:lamo

Yeah, and that math and history you're forced to learn in high school, you'll never use that again either.
 
The plays that are attributed to him should be taught, they are wonderful and promote modern values, but it should also be pointed that there is not much evidence to support the claim that these are all plays written by him or that he has even existed.
 
case in point for the thread?




Anyways, his works are the foundation of pretty much every bit of English composition since, and his works have been adapted and retold (some , to be fair aren't that original to begin with) countless times over. To say it has no relevance is to basically say English literature should not be studied. I'd be curious to hear more specific explanation of why you think so?


We in America have Australian white women coming to America at 16 years old having dropped out of HS to become and emulate black American rappers and you seriously think "Shakespeare" holds any weight at all in our world today?
MFNt2iT.jpg


Iggy Azalea’s post-racial mess: America’s oldest race tale, remixed - Salon.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iggy_Azalea
 
I'd agree that at one fell swoop, there has been a sea change in attitudes to Shakespeare. We can no longer expect modern youth to be exceedingly well read. Ultimately, there's no rhyme nor reason why Shakespeare should be taught forever and a day, and it's high time things changed. I say good riddance to Shakespeare.
 
I'd agree that at one fell swoop, there has been a sea change in attitudes to Shakespeare. We can no longer expect modern youth to be exceedingly well read. Ultimately, there's no rhyme nor reason why Shakespeare should be taught forever and a day, and it's high time things changed. I say good riddance to Shakespeare.

How do you propose to teach an English literature class without including Shakespeare at least in passing? :roll:
 
I'd agree that at one fell swoop, there has been a sea change in attitudes to Shakespeare. We can no longer expect modern youth to be exceedingly well read. Ultimately, there's no rhyme nor reason why Shakespeare should be taught forever and a day, and it's high time things changed. I say good riddance to Shakespeare.

One of the top ten reasons I continue to work to send my grandchildren to private school. They are btw, well read.
 
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