Shocking news this week that some schools are considering dropping Shakespeare from their curriculum. Whilst they’re at it they’re going to reduce the basic content in maths, history and business studies, in order to make subjects easier. Instead of actually teaching, these schools are going to group all the kids together on day one and let them spend their entire school lives alone, smearing excrement on one another.
Who are they hoping to make the subjects easier for I wonder? Pupils who can’t concentrate on anything that can’t be squeezed onto the screen of their mobile phones or deadbeat teachers who spent most of their three years at TeaColl rolling and smoking mega spliffs between bouts of fornication with one another?
Schools are no longer the hard arse institutions they were in my day, we all know that, but I think there needs to be a serious case of hardening the fuck up here and learn to make subjects that aren’t always interesting, unforgettable. Life, on the whole, is hard. When you eventually stop spending most of your time playing with yourself and finally get a job, you soon realise just why it was that you were made to sit through things like math, business studies and Shakespeare.
Yes, today’s youth are easily distracted and have the attention span of a goldfish, but that doesn’t mean we as parents and teachers have to share the same lack of foresight that our children do. It’s all a little too convenient for my liking, deciding that because little Tarquin doesn’t quite get to grips with Macbeth that we should decide to can it all together. Fuck it, let’s forget schooling all together and lets wrap him in bubble wrap and have him play all day on a trampoline with safety nets up the side.
I watched some ugly kid on the news the other night try and justify her disinterest in all things Shakespearean by trying to claim that it was a whole different language. And text speak isn’t? Yes it’s a little fruity, but by dismissing Shakespeare because you can’t be arsed figuring out the prose is like telling me you didn’t get Matrix Reloaded after watching the first one because there wasn’t as much fighting. Mental note to yourself: Don’t even start with me if that meant you gave up on Revolutions.
I can honestly recall more now about the two Shakespearean plays I studied 12 years ago than I can about the last dump I took. Admittedly it was nutty and thus hurt a little on it’s way out, but that’s all I remember. The memories I have of King Lear descending into madness and of Macbeth spiralling into self destruction are as vivid as anything that I’ve watched on YouTube and more thought provoking now than most movies I watch. That’s solely because the teachers that taught us, like Mrs Thorby, had manberries of steel and made them jump from the page and do just that.
Not that it happened over night mind you. My first foray into Macbeth was about as fun as that nutty stool I mentioned a few moments ago. I really struggled with it right up till about three nights out from essay deadline day, where, in the wee small hours of the morning I turned out one of my most accomplished works ever to see the light of day. I did an essay on the loyalty of MacDuff and it was so good the entire English faculty thought I had plagiarised it – and this was in the days before the internet! It was the second highest scoring essay over both 6th and 7th forms that year, one of only three A+’s handed out and catapulted me into the stratosphere of scoring that is intelligent girls, who were all of a sudden interested in me because I was clued up on Shakespeare.
Unfortunately lightning didn’t strike twice; well at least not for my best bud Coops because the essay I wrote him to hand in as his own work only scored an A.
So how do we save Shakespeare? Well a good start would be for school boards and principals to put the pressure on staff to actually do the job they’re hired to do. Too often we blame the kids, who lets face it, are on the whole, complete wasters these days, but there’s no surprise in that. Just because you can’t translate Shakespeare into text speak it shouldn’t mean that you put it into the ‘too hard’ basket.
Shakespearean plays are more than just the written word. That’s what stoner teachers too afraid to teach them and what kids who can write entire sentences with vowels simply don’t get. They are timeless and poignant because of the characters, the tragedies, the emotions and the actions that are behind the words. Shakespeare’s plays prepare you for life because they reflect life. It’s that simple.
The irony of all this talk of giving The Bard the flick is that the schools contemplating it might replace his works with other written works such as blogs. Who knows, maybe they’ll even read mine, they would be silly not to really, but I’ll tell you something for free; I wouldn’t be here writing this today if it weren’t for my getting to grips with Shakespeare all them years ago.
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