In Feb 2023 Ontario's largest school board voted to drop Shakespeare from the curriculum and install a mandatory Indigenous studies course instead. The student trustee who spearheaded the removal stated that Shakespeare offers "no relevance in today's society". We are left with students who read novels written in rap and write instagram posts as assignments (I am not kidding). Your post truly moritified me and I will have a piece ready to offer a counter-balance to such infuriating near-sightedness soon. Also, could hardly believe the insults thrown at Dickens!
What the Toronto school board did was replace Shakespeare instruction with an Indigenous literature course *in grade 11*. My understanding is that its place in other years (grades 9, 10, and 12) is unchanged.
To be sure, I wouldn’t remove Shakespeare from grade 11, and the literature replacing his plays is so so so far from being in the same caliber. But I think somebody could read this comment and mistakenly think Shakespeare has been excised from the entire high school curriculum rather than one year of the curriculum.
Thanks for your comment Sam. At the time the change was introduced, Grade 11 was the only course that included Shakespeare as part of the official curriculum. Grades 9, 10, and 12 have been "destreamed" and no longer offer academic vs applied options but are folded into a general stream. Students are generally working with "texts" but may not be required to read a complete book. While a teacher could choose to include Shakespeare, his classic plays are no longer part of the official curriculum. This is what I understand from reading the TDSB curriculum for all of the high school grades, and it was also reported in the newspapers at the time. I'd be delighted if I am mistaken, and if you came across the inclusion of Shakespeare in offical guidelines , I'd love to see it.
‘Dilettantism is the enemy of good schooling. Children should learn about free indirect style and prosody the way they learn about gravity and molecule formation.’
I was mortified to read this. Do you offer remedial lessons? Or is there a book you can recommend? I have read a lot of serious novels and seen many plays but I do wonder if I miss things others can see because I never learned some basics. Oh dear!
I want to echo Russell's question about whether there is a book you'd recommend. I feel it's easy to identify good books on critical theory, but quite a challenge to find a decent book on the basics of literary form.
Instagram posts? Instagram posts? What fresh hell? I am not as old as him, but I remember we did a whole range of authors, yes, mostly from the canon, and we learnt to recite poems, speak lines from Shakespeare and other dramatists. We also had to put R&J into modern context, learn about gender and sexism in the 16th Century and today, we even read George Eliot. Benjamin Zephaniah was on the syllabus along with Malorie Blackman and other still living writers. We learnt to compare and contrast styles and language. I went on to study English Literature at uni. He's got no idea. The books you study in class may not encourage you to become a reader (check out libraries for that) but they can foster a life long love of the written (and spoken) word.
This is horrific. I am appalled and deeply saddened. There’s so much at stake here. Just as an example, I was in a sophomore high school English in a public school, with perhaps 35 students. We had been going through Julius Caesar, various kids were reading the parts with coaching from the teacher. She explained the deep sarcasm of Mark Antony’s speech, and then had had a particularly sarcastic child read it. He was half way through when a boy stood up like a shot and yelled, “I get it!” He then walked up to another student and punched him in the nose. The injured student was allowed to go have his nose tended to, the teacher calmed us all down, and we went on. You see, the boy who struck out was deeply neurodivergent, and he never got sarcasm before that moment, never realized the other kid was being mean when he would comment on his impoverished clothing by saying things like “Nice threads, Danny.” Something about Shakespeare had helped him understand more about the world around him, gave him a life skill he lacked. Now, I don’t condone such violence, of course, and I’m not say this is ever gonnu happen again quite this way, but I will posit that Shakespeare remains classic because there is something that will unlock SOMETHING for just about everyone in the oeuvre. To ignore the potential of classic literature to grow young minds is perilous.
I sometimes wonder how much of this is downstream from the idea that reading is an innate skill, which underlies the discredited Whole Language literacy movement. If all you have to do is expose kids to text and let them figure it out the way we do with speech, then of course facts have nothing to do with it; of course Shakespeare is interchangeable with Instagram.
One has to look no further than the US election to appreciate the fruits of this promotion of ignorance. Spectacular post, Henry! You continually outdo yourself.
another banger henry. and also, this is crazy. while i hate michael gove, it is absolutely right to require shakespeare in the same way that it is right to require math and it should be required to learn to code: we live in the world that shakespeare, mathematics and coding built and it is not a level playing field if only some children learn how to navigate it.
more seriously: i was just thinking the other day how tired and hackneyed the old saying "we teach you how to think, not what to think" is. to think in competent ways about complex things requires substantive knowledge of the world.
also coming for "a christmas carol" just reveals that he hasn't read it. when you open it up i swear to god it sounds like a youtuber's story. and it's anti-rich!!! which is what we need!!! COME ON!!!!
he is very anti-Dickens which... I guess I can live with... but it's such an anti-teaching attitude to bring to this discussion! yes! the idea that what you think is seperable from how you think is insane! there is SO MUCH science on this :/
Hmm. I'm not fond of Dickens and especially dislike A Christmas Carol. Further I've personal experience of very literate young people who hate the GCSE curriculum - and the joyless grammar-heavy English curriculum that leads up to it, and therefore dropped English ASAP despite loving reading. I do think alienating what should be the natural student body is a major problem. There is a balance to be found.
This idea of knowledge underpinning creativity was a real threshold concept for my teaching. Changed almost everything about how I do things in the classroom. Well said!
One of the best things for my education as a reader and writer was taking a Shakespeare class and having a professor that was actually allowed to teach it the way it should have been. In high school, I never understood Shakespeare and mostly hated it. Now? I think those plays are utterly fascinating.
Not for nothing—and not to high-jack your post—but this is a large part of what my serial novel Why Teach? is about. The road to ignorance is paved with the good intentions of modern pedagogical ‘science.’
I regret putting ‘science’ in quote marks here. I believe in the hard science of pedagogy. I’m just dubious of some of the conclusions many have drawn from it in the last twenty years, and the ways it has been implemented in what I view as the necessarily ‘soft’ spaces of many classrooms.
I am a current undergraduate student, so I only completed my A Level in English Literature 2 years ago. We studied Othello, and it was fascinating to me how it was taught in England compared to South Africa, where I grew up and studied 4 of Shakespeare's plays. In England we read aloud, however from our desks, and studied it theoretically, and memorised quotes, yet the text was never brought to life and most people in my class just watched the film. Back home, when we studied shakespeare we did all that, yet when we read aloud we would stand to read, and we would be made to act certain things out, like R+J's death scene or the blood on my hands scene in Macbeth. We would be told to prepare and memorise the passages not just as short quotes to insert into an essay, yet in their entirety. It led to a deeper and more lasting understanding of the plays far quicker than the 2 years I spent studying Othello in England. We managed to do two plays a year (alongside other texts) instead of 1 in two years, and I can still remember some of the quotes from Macbeth, yet none from Othello. I remember Macbeth far better than Othello in general. For full transparency, back home I went to a private school so my education was of a higher standard than most people receive in South Africa, however the teaching method remains effective.
In Feb 2023 Ontario's largest school board voted to drop Shakespeare from the curriculum and install a mandatory Indigenous studies course instead. The student trustee who spearheaded the removal stated that Shakespeare offers "no relevance in today's society". We are left with students who read novels written in rap and write instagram posts as assignments (I am not kidding). Your post truly moritified me and I will have a piece ready to offer a counter-balance to such infuriating near-sightedness soon. Also, could hardly believe the insults thrown at Dickens!
...adding my answer to your post here: For the Love of Language: Unlocking Literature with 217 Words https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/for-the-love-of-language-unlocking
OMG
That is child abuse in a DEI costume. Hope homeschooling is on the rise there.
What the Toronto school board did was replace Shakespeare instruction with an Indigenous literature course *in grade 11*. My understanding is that its place in other years (grades 9, 10, and 12) is unchanged.
To be sure, I wouldn’t remove Shakespeare from grade 11, and the literature replacing his plays is so so so far from being in the same caliber. But I think somebody could read this comment and mistakenly think Shakespeare has been excised from the entire high school curriculum rather than one year of the curriculum.
Thanks for your comment Sam. At the time the change was introduced, Grade 11 was the only course that included Shakespeare as part of the official curriculum. Grades 9, 10, and 12 have been "destreamed" and no longer offer academic vs applied options but are folded into a general stream. Students are generally working with "texts" but may not be required to read a complete book. While a teacher could choose to include Shakespeare, his classic plays are no longer part of the official curriculum. This is what I understand from reading the TDSB curriculum for all of the high school grades, and it was also reported in the newspapers at the time. I'd be delighted if I am mistaken, and if you came across the inclusion of Shakespeare in offical guidelines , I'd love to see it.
Good Lord. Terrifying.
‘Dilettantism is the enemy of good schooling. Children should learn about free indirect style and prosody the way they learn about gravity and molecule formation.’
I was mortified to read this. Do you offer remedial lessons? Or is there a book you can recommend? I have read a lot of serious novels and seen many plays but I do wonder if I miss things others can see because I never learned some basics. Oh dear!
I'll be doing more close reading posts probably starting next year to cover some of this stuff yes --- it's so important!
I want to echo Russell's question about whether there is a book you'd recommend. I feel it's easy to identify good books on critical theory, but quite a challenge to find a decent book on the basics of literary form.
I can’t think of one good one but The Apple and the Spectropscope is very good
Instagram posts? Instagram posts? What fresh hell? I am not as old as him, but I remember we did a whole range of authors, yes, mostly from the canon, and we learnt to recite poems, speak lines from Shakespeare and other dramatists. We also had to put R&J into modern context, learn about gender and sexism in the 16th Century and today, we even read George Eliot. Benjamin Zephaniah was on the syllabus along with Malorie Blackman and other still living writers. We learnt to compare and contrast styles and language. I went on to study English Literature at uni. He's got no idea. The books you study in class may not encourage you to become a reader (check out libraries for that) but they can foster a life long love of the written (and spoken) word.
This is horrific. I am appalled and deeply saddened. There’s so much at stake here. Just as an example, I was in a sophomore high school English in a public school, with perhaps 35 students. We had been going through Julius Caesar, various kids were reading the parts with coaching from the teacher. She explained the deep sarcasm of Mark Antony’s speech, and then had had a particularly sarcastic child read it. He was half way through when a boy stood up like a shot and yelled, “I get it!” He then walked up to another student and punched him in the nose. The injured student was allowed to go have his nose tended to, the teacher calmed us all down, and we went on. You see, the boy who struck out was deeply neurodivergent, and he never got sarcasm before that moment, never realized the other kid was being mean when he would comment on his impoverished clothing by saying things like “Nice threads, Danny.” Something about Shakespeare had helped him understand more about the world around him, gave him a life skill he lacked. Now, I don’t condone such violence, of course, and I’m not say this is ever gonnu happen again quite this way, but I will posit that Shakespeare remains classic because there is something that will unlock SOMETHING for just about everyone in the oeuvre. To ignore the potential of classic literature to grow young minds is perilous.
I sometimes wonder how much of this is downstream from the idea that reading is an innate skill, which underlies the discredited Whole Language literacy movement. If all you have to do is expose kids to text and let them figure it out the way we do with speech, then of course facts have nothing to do with it; of course Shakespeare is interchangeable with Instagram.
💯
Well said.
thanks!
One has to look no further than the US election to appreciate the fruits of this promotion of ignorance. Spectacular post, Henry! You continually outdo yourself.
Thanks :)
another banger henry. and also, this is crazy. while i hate michael gove, it is absolutely right to require shakespeare in the same way that it is right to require math and it should be required to learn to code: we live in the world that shakespeare, mathematics and coding built and it is not a level playing field if only some children learn how to navigate it.
more seriously: i was just thinking the other day how tired and hackneyed the old saying "we teach you how to think, not what to think" is. to think in competent ways about complex things requires substantive knowledge of the world.
also coming for "a christmas carol" just reveals that he hasn't read it. when you open it up i swear to god it sounds like a youtuber's story. and it's anti-rich!!! which is what we need!!! COME ON!!!!
he is very anti-Dickens which... I guess I can live with... but it's such an anti-teaching attitude to bring to this discussion! yes! the idea that what you think is seperable from how you think is insane! there is SO MUCH science on this :/
Hmm. I'm not fond of Dickens and especially dislike A Christmas Carol. Further I've personal experience of very literate young people who hate the GCSE curriculum - and the joyless grammar-heavy English curriculum that leads up to it, and therefore dropped English ASAP despite loving reading. I do think alienating what should be the natural student body is a major problem. There is a balance to be found.
What an admission that he bores his students to death! If you can't engage students with great works of literature, maybe teaching is not for you.
There’s such merit in this argument. I entirely agree. Thank you Henry.
thanks!
This idea of knowledge underpinning creativity was a real threshold concept for my teaching. Changed almost everything about how I do things in the classroom. Well said!
such a shame it is not standard part of teacher training!
One of the best things for my education as a reader and writer was taking a Shakespeare class and having a professor that was actually allowed to teach it the way it should have been. In high school, I never understood Shakespeare and mostly hated it. Now? I think those plays are utterly fascinating.
Bravo, Henry. Why aren't you Education Secretary?
lol they wouldn't enjoy that at all
That post should be in the national press.
very kind of you :)
Not for nothing—and not to high-jack your post—but this is a large part of what my serial novel Why Teach? is about. The road to ignorance is paved with the good intentions of modern pedagogical ‘science.’
I regret putting ‘science’ in quote marks here. I believe in the hard science of pedagogy. I’m just dubious of some of the conclusions many have drawn from it in the last twenty years, and the ways it has been implemented in what I view as the necessarily ‘soft’ spaces of many classrooms.
I am a current undergraduate student, so I only completed my A Level in English Literature 2 years ago. We studied Othello, and it was fascinating to me how it was taught in England compared to South Africa, where I grew up and studied 4 of Shakespeare's plays. In England we read aloud, however from our desks, and studied it theoretically, and memorised quotes, yet the text was never brought to life and most people in my class just watched the film. Back home, when we studied shakespeare we did all that, yet when we read aloud we would stand to read, and we would be made to act certain things out, like R+J's death scene or the blood on my hands scene in Macbeth. We would be told to prepare and memorise the passages not just as short quotes to insert into an essay, yet in their entirety. It led to a deeper and more lasting understanding of the plays far quicker than the 2 years I spent studying Othello in England. We managed to do two plays a year (alongside other texts) instead of 1 in two years, and I can still remember some of the quotes from Macbeth, yet none from Othello. I remember Macbeth far better than Othello in general. For full transparency, back home I went to a private school so my education was of a higher standard than most people receive in South Africa, however the teaching method remains effective.
I love this :)