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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

You are arguing that people shouldn't be exposed to something if they can't understand all of it, or if they don't have a good enough teacher. First of all, everyone finishes their first reading of Shakespeare with a partial understanding. Second, how sad is that for the people who don't get to read it because they don't have a "great" teacher-- never mind how you decide who that is.

I do agree it is better acted than read, because that is how it was meant to be presented. But a modern audience is going to require explanation regardless of accent.

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Oh, I don't know. There is also the very real possibility that it will seem hopelessly obtuse to the student who will never approach it again. IMO, a poor introduction to a subject is worse than neutral.

And maybe that's okay, too, but high school isn't the only place that many students will get to experience Shakespeare and if it can't be done right there might be more damage than good done.

There is a difference between not exposing a student to something that they cannot understand at first glance and not having a teacher who doesn't understand the matter themselves try to muddle their way through a presentation the material. Making it part of standard curriculum means that we will have a heavy dosage of the latter, whereas making it optional means that only those teachers who truly have a passion for the thing will present it (theoretically, of course).

Then again, I'm in America so our teachers don't have time to teach anything that isn't showing up on a standardized test, and for me this debate is purely academic :)

Students choose to never approach it again at good schools and bad. Should teachers that we don't think are good enough to teach Shakespeare teach Our Town instead?

My education was deficient; I don't understand the Our Town reference :)

But in general, yes - if I were thrown into a classroom as a substitute teacher for a month, I certainly wouldn't teach Shakespeare, because I'm not anywhere near qualified to do so. My wife probably would be - she's the one who enlightened me about a few things in Romeo & Juliet that were completely opaque to me when I read it. But I'd probably focus on the things I felt qualified to teach without reading from a Teacher's Guide To Keeping Students Awake During Hamlet, or whatnot.

Our Town is an American play that, while dated, is easier for a modern audience to understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Town

This is highly compatible to mathematics education in the US, which is largely taught by uninspired teachers who don’t quite understand what they are teaching.

Second, how sad is that for the people who don't get to read it because they don't have a "great" teacher

It's not sad at all. You don't regret what you don't know you missed. Let them discover it on their own, from a better source, at a later date.

Shakespeare study was one of the worst periods in my education. It's boring, irrelevant, and to this day I don't understand the obsession. I'd rather that any child read the full works of Steinbeck than anything by Shakespeare.

It reminds me of the way we learned geometric proofs in 8th grade. When I finally got into proper algebraic proofs in college it was an indescribable joy.

If you think it is irrelevant there is probably a lot of things going on in contemporary books and plays that are going over your head. Which is fine. But why keep others away from it because you didn't like it?

If you think it is irrelevant there is probably a lot of things going on in contemporary books and plays that are going over your head

I don't watch plays, and I doubt I'm missing many Shakespeare references in modern books. Even if I am, I don't lament what I don't know I'm missing.

But why keep others away from it because you didn't like it?

Because it's an enormous time sink that could be better used on other things. Why turn so many kids off of plays, poetry, and appreciation of literature because of an obsession with one playwright?

> You are arguing that people shouldn't be exposed to something if they can't understand all of it

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as that extreme. You don't have to understand all of it, but I - and I suspect, so did many of my peers - understood so little of it that the time was effectively wasted. There is other literature available that would likely have served us much better.

> But a modern audience is going to require explanation regardless of accent.

Exactly - and without some explanation, it's very much like reading something in a foreign language.

I know you weren't being that extreme, but I think the point you are making could be made to dumb down a lot education. Should we not teach kids the best programming languages because most teachers really aren't very good programmers?

Regarding explanation, I have never seen a Shakespeare book without a lot of annotation.

> Should we not teach kids the best programming languages because most teachers really aren't very good programmers?

I would argue that a bad teacher teaching a good language can do a lot more harm to a novice programmer than not learning it at all.

My band conductor was fond of saying that practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent. It can be harder to replace bad habits with good habits than to instill good habits from the start.

> First of all, everyone finishes their first reading of Shakespeare with a partial understanding.

At best. I knew people at public school whose major projects were coloring maps with colored pencils. They didn't have to draw the borders, they just had to color the countries correctly. It was literally a complicated color by numbers.

Not all educations are the same.

I used to joke that some of my classmates couldn't point out Russia on a map of Russia.

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