Back to school
With school starting up again, I’ve been thinking a lot about issues in teaching and learning. My thoughts keep returning to Dana Dusbiber, the high school teacher from Sacramento who suggested back in June that we should remove Shakespeare from the English curriculum. Her opinion, published in the Washington Post, naturally riled the Shakespeare-loving community, which circled its wagons in defense of the Bard. Sadly, many of the responses focused on attacking Dusbiber personally, calling her (among other things) ignorant, illiterate, and racist. I don’t know Dusbiber or her students, but what I see in her opinion isn’t an ignorant, illiterate racist but a veteran teacher searching for the best ways to educate her students. She shows passion for her work and for the well-being of her students.
She is, however, wrong.
So now that the dust has settled and tempers have cooled, it’s time to discuss not only Shakespeare’s place in the curriculum, but also the bigger issue I see in Dusbiber’s opinion: the state of English language arts education in America.
To each her own
The foundation of her opinion is simple: Dana Dusbiber doesn’t like Shakespeare. She opens her argument by admitting,
I am a high school English teacher. I am not supposed to dislike Shakespeare. But I 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.
Obviously she’s entitled to her opinions. We all have them. I love Shakespeare, but I don’t like Hemingway. The problem isn’t Dusbiber’s distaste for Shakespeare, it’s that her distaste is a significantly deeper issue than she lets on. Essentially, she uses all her other points to justify why she doesn’t like Shakespeare—and why her students shouldn’t, either.
Now, I hate broccoli, but I don’t pretend it’s nutritionally deficient. And that’s the real crux of the problem: not liking something doesn’t make it worthless. We cannot base curriculum design solely on the personal tastes of individual teachers.
Teachers are fully capable of simultaneously accepting the value of a text and embracing that it’s not their cup of tea. That’s a normal part of academic life, especially where literature is concerned. More importantly, though, their students can reap the benefits. Students need to see they don’t have to like something just because others do. They need to understand their preferences don’t define their intelligence. And they need to learn that developing critical analyses goes far beyond liking or disliking what they’ve read. It doesn’t take much for a teacher to model a healthy hate-but-appreciate attitude.
Method acting
As with most ideas, this concept isn’t new or revolutionary. When I was studying to be a high school English teacher, our professor warned us there would be times the curriculum required we teach texts we don’t like, and she reassured us that it was OK. The world would not end. Our students would not suffer. In fact, she encouraged us to let our students know how we felt. It takes some of the pressure off of them. Effusive praise can make a subject sound esoteric, as though it’s “just an English teacher thing.” Worse yet, students worry if they don’t feel the same way, they’ll be punished (typically with lower grades). Knowing they can not only develop but express their own opinions without fear of retribution is refreshingly freeing.
None of that means a teacher should simply stand there and complain. But personal taste can and should come into classroom discussion. Again, this isn’t new or revolutionary. Teachers successfully use opinion-based discussion prompts all the time. Students who feel passionate about a subject tend to learn more about it—even if that passion comes from a place of anger or disgust (see my old post about The Scarlet Letter).
Romeo and Juliet is a perfect example. I often hear students complain that the titular characters are idiots, and the play is therefore stupid. That’s not a particularly well-formed or well-reasoned critique, but at least they’re connecting with it. A good teacher can easily use those gut reactions to guide students through a more thoughtful, supported analysis of the play. Why do they think the characters are dumb? What could or should they have done differently? Why didn’t they do those things? The class can even delve deeper into text analysis and discuss how the inclusion or exclusion of the prologue changes the role of fate in the couple’s lives. All of these prompts require vital literacy skills, but they don’t require either the teacher or the students to enjoy the play.
To err is human
Even though it’s irrelevant whether Dusbiber likes Shakespeare or not, it’s still important to address why she doesn’t like him: she finds the language difficult. I say, good! Her students are going to feel the same way. And just as they need to know it’s OK not to like something, they need to know that it’s OK not to “get” something right away. Skills, knowledge, and understanding don’t always come easily.
Too many students assume teachers are just naturally adept at their disciplines, as though it takes no work to get there. Faith in that myth is a serious hindrance to education. Students often fall into that talent trap; they fear some just have it and others don’t, so if a subject doesn’t click right away, they’re doomed to failure (so why try?). But that way madness lies.
One of the most empowering lessons a teacher can impart is how to pursue knowledge, and teachers intimidated by Shakespeare’s language are blessed with ample opportunity to do so. When a student asks about a tricky, confusing passage, saying “I don’t know, but let’s find out” shows them they’re allowed to not know everything already. It shows them reading comprehension is a set of attainable skills instead of innate talents. Ideally, as the whole class, teacher and students together, works through the text, all will learn that facing the challenge is as meaningful as the result.
Straw dogs bite back
The rest of Dusbiber’s complaints boil down to one question: what should constitute the literary canon?
Dusbiber argues Shakespeare no longer belongs because he “lived in a pretty small world,” so we should “acknowledge him as chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.” This point reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Shakespeare, his world, and his work. Elizabethan and Jacobean London may not have consumed much acreage, but as a major international port and the seat of England’s power, it was decidedly not the “small world” Dusbiber thinks it was. On top of that, calling Shakespeare a “chronicler” is wildly inaccurate. Raphael Holinshed was a chronicler. William Shakespeare was a playwright and poet. Sure, he wrote some history plays, but those were fictionalizations (which often relied on the work of real chroniclers). Sure, he took inspiration from the life around him, but so do all writers of all eras and locales—including all the authors and storytellers Dusbiber would prefer to teach.
That misunderstanding further informs Dusbiber’s opinion when she says she does “not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach my students about the human condition.” Neither does anyone else. Granted, many of us believe Shakespeare uses such rich characters to tell such diverse stories that anyone can find one with whom they identify. It’s why his work is so beloved, so often translated and performed, the world over. None of us, however, claim he is the only writer who does so. That’s one reason why high school courses cover more than just Shakespeare.
And I have to ask, has the human condition really changed all that much since…ever?
Congratulations on making it this far
So, if Shakespeare weren’t in the canon, what would we teach instead?
In designing her preferred curriculum, Dusbiber prioritizes inspiring her students to enjoy reading. That’s a goal we can all get behind. Americans, especially young ones, aren’t reading as much as they used to, largely because they don’t find any joy in it. The more students read for fun, though, the more likely they are to develop strong language skills. To that end, Dusbiber’s right when she says, “our students should be excited about what they read—and that may often mean that we need to find the time to let them choose their own literature.” Plenty of teachers do exactly that and for that very reason. As a student, I had several teachers who gave the class opportunities to choose our own reading assignments, either from a list of approved options or from hearts’ desires. On at least one of those occasions, I chose to read Shakespeare.
Because she doesn’t like Shakespeare, Dusbiber assumes none of her students would, either, thus robbing them of the chance to make that choice for themselves. She’d prefer to teach from what she’s judged to be the “WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.” If she had used the world “also” instead of “better,” I could stand by her here, too. There are indeed boatloads of great works out there that might speak to her students. But I’m not sure which needs her students have that Shakespeare can’t meet (Dusbiber doesn’t specify) or why the other literature can meet them better. I fear she’s so focused on just getting her students to read at all that she’s willing to settle for high-interest/low-vocabulary books that offer her students little challenge.
Reading comprehension skills come with practice and guidance. At some point, challenge has to come into play as well. The decline in voluntary reading corresponds with the decline in higher-level reading skills. Of the over 1.8 million high school graduates who took that ACT in 2014, only 44% of them met the reading standard for college and career readiness. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, better known as the Nation’s Report Card, provides and even bleaker view: in both 2009 and 2013, only 38% of 12th graders reached the “at or above proficient” standard for college preparedness in reading, down from 40% in 1992. Say what you will about standardized testing, but those numbers are horrifying.
One reason for these low scores is the lack of complexity in the curriculum. The average readability of high school texts is only at the 5th grade level. Luckily, that doesn’t mean high school students just keep reading the same books they read as tweens (although that happens, too). The “grade level” is based on the lengths of words and sentences, not how the writer uses them. Of Mice and Men and Night both rate at the 4th grade level, but neither would be considered 4th grade material. There’s no question these types of “readable” texts belong in high school classrooms, but they cannot be the only ones. The lack of complexity in high school hinders students long-term. Reading levels for adults at work and in school are much higher, so students need to be exposed to complex texts with advanced vocabulary and syntax. They need to learn “bigger” words and how to unpack complicated, even convoluted, language or they won’t be able to approach the reading requirements of adulthood. Shakespeare’s plays are among the only commonly-taught texts written at high school levels.
We’re already collapsing into a TL;DR society where ease is prized above all. Do we really want to exacerbate the issue by sending our high school graduates into the world without the skills to comprehend a complex text?
The elephant in the room
So far I have avoided addressing the loudest, angriest responses to Dusbiber’s piece, which have latched onto her points about race. One sentence in particular has drawn the most ire:
What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important.
Conspiracy theorists and certain anti-Stratfordians aside, we can’t get around the fact that Shakespeare was a white man who had one particular set of experiences and therefore one particular view of life. If high schools limited their curricula to Shakespeare and Shakespeare only for four full years, Dusbiber could have a valid point. I can’t speak for her school, but in my experience, many schools allow, if not require, teachers to include literature from other cultural perspectives. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, for instance, is among the most read novels in 10th grade. I know I read it that year. And I loved Isabella Allende’s Eva Luna, which I never would have discovered were it not part of a summer reading assignment.
Dusbiber wants to ensure her students have the chance to discover these types of books. Again I say, good! She believes the only way to do so, though, is to eliminate Shakespeare. She concludes,
If we only teach students of color, as I have been fortunate to do my entire career, then it is far past the time for us to dispense with our Eurocentric presentation of the literary world. Conversely, if we only teach white students, it is our imperative duty to open them up to a world of diversity through literature that they may never encounter anywhere else in their lives.
Her logic here is profoundly flawed. Eliminating Eurocentric literature makes no more sense than eliminating the literature of any of the cultures Dusbiber would prefer teaching. Including Shakespeare in the curriculum does not exclude authors from other cultures. The same year I read Things Fall Apart, I read The Merchant of Venice. The same year I read Eva Luna, I read Hamlet, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing. In fact, students get more out of both works—and see more of the human condition—when teachers design thematic units that encourage comparing and contrasting and other critical analysis skills.
As Dusbiber points out, white students benefit from experiencing diverse literature and students of color can benefit from seeing themselves reflected in their reading. But, if we extend that logic, minority students also benefit from the traditional canon and white students from seeing themselves. We mustn’t include one at the expense of the other. The qualities of Arthur Miller aren’t negated by those of August Wilson or vice versa.
The man in the mirror
It’s never easy for a teacher to narrow down the myriad options they have when selecting texts for their courses. But it doesn’t have to be an either/or choice between the “dead white guys” and “everybody else.” The argument against the male-heavy, Eurocentric, traditional canon has been around for a long time. Like it or not, though, we cannot deny the impact of western civilization on the world. We can argue the justice of the ages of exploration and empire, when Europeans colonized every corner of the globe, but we cannot argue that few societies have remained untouched by western civilization. Choosing to discount that fact is irresponsible. Ignoring the western tradition’s influence on every nook and cranny of modern, global society only puts students at a disadvantage.
Communication relies on sharing a common vocabulary. Shakespeare could expect his audience to have familiarity with the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology and could therefore allude to those stories without needing to explain himself. The same can be said for all the post-Shakespeare writers (of any culture) who allude to his work, too. Knowing Macbeth helps a student better understand Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Heck, recently I even saw a local car dealership allude to Romeo and Juliet by beginning its TV commercial with “What’s in a name?” We cannot afford to lose that common vocabulary by pretending it doesn’t exist.
We should be expanding the canon, diversifying it, enriching it—not replacing it.
Never fear, Underdog is here!
I’m biased. I love Shakespeare. I love teaching, producing, and performing Shakespeare. I get that not everyone feels the same way. When it comes down to it, though, Dusbiber doesn’t raise a single issue that warrants removing Shakespeare from the curriculum.
Oh, and if you hate Shakespeare but are willing (or required) to teach him, I’d be happy to help.