HOW
TO THINK LIKE SHAKESPEARE:Lessons from a Renaissance Education
Scott Newstok
ISBN 978-0-691-17708-3
Princeton £16.99
Reviewed by Alan Dent
Composed of fourteen major chapters each entitled Of… (Of Thinking,
Of Ends, Of Craft) this is a book about literature and education and
the relation between the two. Newstok has in his sights the nexus of
idiocies which dominates the US education system, but much that he
says applies equally to the UK context, copied as it has been over
the past decades from US failure. High-stakes testing, imposed
curricula, narrow focus on putative literacy and numeracy, the
reduction of the teacher from autonomous professional to supervised
operative, micro-management of the classroom, league tables,
markestisation, intrusive and punitive inspections, the dismissal of
everything which doesn’t lend itself to easy measurement; these and
more have turned schools into exam factories, demoralised and bored
teachers and pupils alike and robbed education of the richness
Newstok discovers in the mode of education Shakespeare experienced.
Early on he points out, in response to what he sees as misguided
educational remedies from Ken Robinson, that Shakespeare would have
been taught in Latin and wouldn’t have entered school till the age
of seven. The age may be optimum. What Shakespeare wouldn’t have
experienced is what Gert Biesta has dubbed “learnification”. Shove
the data in, measure it as it comes out. If there’s enough of it,
the child is educated. The rich, of course, try to get their progeny
out of a system based on such a reduced vision which drives Newstok
to John Dewey:
“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must
the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our
schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our
democracy.”
The sense of egalitarian communism (in the widest definition)
contained in this, is anathema to the current US leadership; little
surprise it is engaged on the destruction of democracy. Education
must encourage that most difficult of activities, thinking, and to
do so it needs to engage with the past, argues Newstok. What he
means by “thinking” is conscious intellectual effort. He and the
mentors he quotes are right: people try to avoid it because it’s
exhausting; but try to stop thinking. The only way you can do it is
to think about not thinking. Thinking is our biological inheritance.
We do it as inevitably as we breathe. All “thinkers” do is elevate
it. They catch thought in flight and examine it and in so doing they
sift what is merely reflexive from what has been subject to intense
conscious scrutiny and forced to agree with evidence. The more
conscious activity flows from the less. Children think endlessly. It
is the remarkable achievement of our education system to convince
them the activity is worthless unless it produces a certificate.
What’s education for? Every school has a vacuous mission statement
yet no one knows what the aim is. Newstok quotes a lovely poem by
Chuang Tzu:
When an archer is shooting for nothing
Apparently, this fits with the experience of archers: the best way
to hit the target is not to try. Get your action right and aim will
follow. Our schools have turned this on its head: all that matters
is hitting the target. This sucking of meaning and pleasure out of
the process of learning is what our Secretaries of State call “the
standards agenda”.
Interestingly, Newstok refers to the Harvard Business School’s
Clayton Christensen, an advocate of “disruptive innovation” (there’s
one of those in Downing St), who thinks it would be a good thing if
half of US universities went bankrupt. Learning could then go
online. One wonders if the Covid experience will have changed his
mind.
“Assessment” is derived form the Latin for estimation of property
value for the purpose of collecting taxes. When Newstok asked his
seven-year-old daughter what new words she’d learned, it was the one
she produced. Volunteering in his child’s school , he asked a class
teacher what she thought of the manic concentration on results. She
replied it was cruelty to children. Another remarkable
accomplishment of our system.
What is the aim of education? It’s like asking what is the aim of
friendship. It is its own end, whatever the Harvard Business School
may think.
Who would ask a postman about climate change? Newstok’s mate John
Latimer spent forty years noting the seasonal changes in flora and
fauna as he went about his work. Now, climate change scientists are
studying his results. D.H.Lawrence won the Botany prize at
Nottingham University having been taught by his dad, a semi-literate
miner. Newstok puts this under the heading of “craft”.
He quotes a chef who founded
highly qualified graduates of culinary schools unable to cope with
the demands of a kitchen. A primer may help you learn German but if
you want to be fluent, go and live in Berlin for a while. “Making is
thinking” says Richard Sennet. We have denatured learning so far
that people can’t boil an egg without having the egg-boiling manual
to hand. Shakespeare would have been familiar with craft and his
plays make multiple references to it.
The irony of the vogue for “personalised learning” is that it is
thoroughly depersonalised. Children are assessed
by algorithms and the subtle and attentive responses of
teachers to their pupils considered unreliable. “Take infinite pains
to make something that looks effortless” said Michelangelo. Newstok
is thinking of “fitness” not in the bonkers, narcissistic,
build-your-biceps-in-the-gym sense, but rather appropriateness. He
cites the Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well who
mocks the Clown who might have an answer to fit all questions like
“a barber’s chair that fits all buttocks.” Uniformity is the enemy
of fitness. Children must be permitted to find for themselves a
“fit” way to relate to the world and learn about it. Impossible in
our barber’s chair system where all must squeeze into the same
narrow seat.
Newstok includes a still from Eric Pickersgill’s telling
photographic series Removed in which people were pictured in
everyday circumstances attending to their mobiles and the pictures
printed with the devices taken away. How many times have teachers
ordered, “Pay attention”?The wonder, in our culture of ubiquitous
distraction, is that children have any capacity for attention at
all. As Thoreau put it in 1854:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our
attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an
unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive
at…We are in great haste to build a magnetic telegraph from Maine to
Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to
communicate.”
The wilful destruction of attention is the handmaiden of the spread
of stupefaction. “Enter Ophelia, distracted”
reads the stage direction in Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s day,
distraction was seen as a version of madness. Today, it has become
requisite. What are we distracted from? Other people and ourselves.
We pay more attention to screens than faces. We should be alarmed
but not surprised that, according to data from the 2011 Torrance
tests of creative thinking children are:
“Less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and
verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less
unconventional, less lively and passionate, less apt to connect
seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesising, and less likely to
see things from a different angle.”
Less, presumably, than children of previous generations.
Leslie Brothers, author of Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes
The Human Mind, argues that the basis of human society is
conversation. Our culture has displaced it in favour of the sermon,
the lecture, the speech, the press conference, the broadcast; forms
in which there is no possibility of creative exchange; forms in
which power speaks down to us. Newstok quotes Shakespeare’s
contemporary, Montaigne, who writes of conversation’s capacity to
“rub and polish our brains by contact with those of others.” When
conversation is diminished you get a brain like Trump’s or Putin’s,
as amenable to polishing as rice pudding. Newstok intelligently
refers to Socrates who argued that internal conversation is as
important as external. Most language use, as Chomsky teaches, is
internal. The two forms of conversation complement each other:
talking questions through inspires thinking questions through.
Today, we go to a computer, but as Picasso said: “..they are
useless. They can only give you answers.”
Shakespeare’s plays ask questions, as does good science. Einstein
leaves us with the conundrum that the Standard Model excludes
gravity and quantum mechanics is puzzled by its own discoveries. Why
then do we tell our children education is about answers? Why don’t
we let them follow the thread of their curiosity? Why don’t we tell
them there is no ulterior purpose to learning?
Newstok’s book is full of inspiring references to the plays and
poems but also to a wide range of writer’s and thinkers from
Shakespeare’s age and others. He astutely relates these to his
modern theme of the parlous state of our education system. However,
he does make one egregious if small mistake: he quotes Katherine
Birbalsingh, apparently sympathetically. Ms Birbalsingh regretted
the departure of Michael Gove from the Department of Education,
saying it was a pity he hadn’t been permitted to complete his work;
she has her pupils sing I Vow To Thee My Country in
assembly; she has them recite If before lunch; she forces
them to walk silently down corridors between lessons. Mr Gove is
guilty of all the sins Newstok spikes. Birbalsingh fails utterly to
comprehend that our education system is such a wreckage because it
is made to serve an economic system which has an interest in
widespread stupefaction. She seems to think everything “traditional”
is positive: conquest, slavery, exploitation, denial of political
rights, oppression of women, child labour, physical punishment of
children? She sets a straw man of “progressive” against an equally
phoney “traditional”. Her Manichean view lacks subtlety. She seems
to believe that in school, children learn only from teachers and not
from one another. Banning conversation between them from lesson to
lesson is a matter of control, not education. It diminishes their
socialisation She seems to have difficulty distinguishing one from
the other. She claims her pupils are taught to be kind and
respectful, suggesting pupils in most schools are neither. In short,
she believes schools should be efficient exam factories. Pupils are
“given knowledge” – just what “knowledge” is she seems not to
wonder; is it, for example, knowing the works of Karl Marx or the
plays of Joe Orton? – they show they have it and that’s education.
No wonder Shakespeare saw his
schoolboy “creeping like snail/ Unwillingly to school”.
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