Teacher: Why I don’t want to assign Shakespeare anymore (even though he’s in the Common Core)

Valerie Strauss hosts  Dana Dusbiber on the Washington Post Answer Sheet blog, 13 June 2015

I am a high school English teacher. I am not supposed to dislike Shakespeare. But I do. And not only do I dislike Shakespeare because of my own personal disinterest in reading stories written in an early form of the English language that I cannot always easily navigate, but also because 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.

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Teacher: Why it is ridiculous not to teach Shakespeare in school

Valerie Strauss hosts a response by Matthew Truesdale on the Washington Post Answer Sheet blog, 13 June 2015

Dana Dusbiber does a disservice to teachers and particularly those of us who teach English when she makes the argument that Shakespeare should be left to “rest in peace.”

Ms. Dusbiber is frustrated by the narrowness of the Western canon and by the expectation that high school students read Shakespeare.  But that expectation is not a new one.  Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet have been staples of any high school English curriculum for years upon years.  I prefer Othello, so I teach that.  But I don’t do it because I feel beholden to any set of expectations or standards–I do it because I want my students to have the experience of reading it…that’s it, and that’s all.

The Progressive Case for Teaching Shakespeare

By Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig for The New Republic, 16 June 2015

Last week, high school English teacher Dana Dusbiber took to the pages of The Washington Post to explain why she is reluctant to assign Shakespeare to her students. Dusbiber, who teaches in Sacramento, California, argued that undue deference to the Bard excludes “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.” Dusbiber went on to dispute the claim that “a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach my students about the human condition,” and wondered why “we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago” when there are more contemporary approaches to uniquely American life on offer in modern literature. Dusbiber also pointed out that there are older literary traditions from around the world we might introduce into curricula in place of Shakespeare if we want to draw on pre-modern sources without lingering too long on the thoughts of old, dead white men.

I agree with Dusbiber that Shakespeare should not be taught to the exclusion of writers of color or contemporary authors: There should be room in a person’s education for encounters with a variety of texts. Dusbiber’s suggestion that a wider sampling of global literature be introduced into high school curricula also seems right to me, as boundaries between cultures grow more porous and the world, in turn, continues to shrink. And she is doubtlessly correct that kids have a hard time connecting with Shakespeare compared to writers who work in our modern vernacular. But the alien distance of Shakespeare’s world is precisely why he deserves a permanent place in the literary canon, especially if one is interested in inculcating a broad social and political imagination into young adults.

Do We Need Shakespeare?

By Megan McArdle for the Bloomberg View, 17 June 2015

While I was on vacation, the Washington Post published a piece by an English teacher making the case against teaching Shakespeare. Naturally, then, it had to publish the case for teaching Shakespeare. And then the New Republic made the progressive case for teaching Shakespeare. Presumably we will soon have the Conservative Case Against Teaching Shakespeare, the Libertarian Case for Teaching Whatever the Heck You Want, the Antinomian Case Against Having an Opinion About Teaching Shakespeare and so forth.

What I’d like to hear more of — and have failed to see so far in any of these essays — is a coherent theory of why we bother to teach any writers at all. It seems to me that we need to know that before we can decide whether Shakespeare is one of the writers we ought to teach, or whether we ought to give up on the project entirely and just let the students spend their time watching YouTube videos, or reading Shakespeare, as they please.

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