Posted on 05/16/2004 10:25:07 PM PDT by SteveH
The Classics on Campus: Looking for William Shakespeare
by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 24, 2004
Mention the classics on college campuses today and you are lucky if you get references to Coca-Cola or cars—and that’s in the faculty lounges and administration offices.
One of our readers summed up the change in college education in an e-mail to us. “My God,” he wrote, “when I went to university I studied Plato, Socrates, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, European and World History, French Literature, and Canadian History, to mention a few of the courses I took. And I was taking Engineering!”
Researchers at the University of California estimate that less than 2 percent of American colleges have what could be called “a true core curriculum.” Eight years ago, the National Alumni Forum (NAF) surveyed 70 colleges and universities to see what they offered as core curricula. “Of the 70 universities,” they found, “only 23 now require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare.”
The Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) found even more disheartening news in its 2003 report, Death of the Liberal Arts? The IWF looked at the schools that U.S. News & World Report ranked as the top 10 liberal-arts colleges.
Their findings?
“Bowdoin has the dubious distinction of being the only top-ten undergraduate liberal-arts college that doesn’t offer freshmen any Shakespeare.” Bowdoin College is located in Maine.
Swarthmore requires English majors to take three courses on literature written before 1830 and three on the literary output produced after that benchmark year. As the IWF puts it, “Swarthmore requires as much study of these authors who have written in the last 173 years as of the previous 1,730 years combined.” Swarthmore sits outside of Philadelphia, Pa.
When a school requires the study of Shakespeare, their required courses, in turn, look at the Bard rather loosely. At Sen. Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, Wellesley, in Massachusetts, English majors are required to take a Shakespeare course, but the department’s offerings focus on such questionable themes as “gender relations and identities” in his work.
This flexible interpretation of the liberal arts more closely mirrors the trend in academia today. For example, freshmen can take a course called, “Green World,” at Williams College, which is also in Massachusetts.
“Green World” examines “ways in which literature has constructed and interpreted the green-written world as the archetypal symbol of man’s desire to transform chaos into civilization and art—to tame, order, idealize, and copy nature’s bounty while humanizing, plundering and destroying the environment.”
Such an offering, in turn, pales in comparison to courses offered at other schools such as Cornell and Amherst. Cornell offers a course in “Gay Fiction.” Not to be outdone, Amherst features a more specialized class in “Black Gay Fiction.”
Why study classic authors in place of apparently more “cutting edge” writers? The NAF quotes one teacher who summed it up rather well: “If our teachers do not know Shakespeare, how can they convince students that the study of the history of their language is important?”
We thought our previously mentioned reader came to a rather poignant conclusion. “Thank god I graduated from a university nearly fifty years ago,” he wrote.
“At that time our goal was to end up as educated and tolerant people when we had finished our studies.”
Following that same timeline, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) report that “many students graduate from college with less knowledge about the world and fewer useful skills than high schoolers of fifty years ago.”
“Whether the subject is history, science, mathematics, English, or any other, both surveys and anecdotal evidence demonstrate that many recipients of college diplomas these days have a thin and patchy education; rather than the strong general education that used to be the hallmark of college graduates.”
For their part, both the ACTA and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have produced guides to core curricula that center around the classics. Now, if only we could get college administrators and professors to read them.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
As Lino Graglia-one of the best legal minds in the country and an outstanding scholar in his own right-said after hearing these statements: "What exactly does that mean?"
It means the elimination of any semblance of a unifying, national culture and the further fragmentation of an already precariously divided country.
It also means that this generation of students has been raised (intentionally, no less!), to be more ignorant then the generation that preceded it.
Weep for America!
Amazing. English majors should be required to study the master of the English language.
I wasn't able to graduate from Brooklyn College without reading from the works of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Keats, Thucydides, Euripides, and a host of classic American novelists.
Hold on. I think that the statistic cited means not that English Majors fail to study Shakespeare, but that they do not take a class about him alone. I'm an Engineer(ing student), and my english course covered King Lear. I also read the classics on my own time, when I get the chance (well, I don't read shakespeare, but that's because I think [b]reading[/b] plays is an abomination. They are meant to be watched). It's just good to be well rounded.
yes, i agree... my husband and i homeschool our two sons (3yrs. and 8 yrs.) and we are giving them a classical education--next month i will be introducing them to Shakespeare... they know it's coming up and are very excited... last year we studied ancient civilizations (so we read Greek Mythology) and this year we are studying The Middle Ages/Renaissance/Reformation... (we teach from a Christian worldview/perspective)...
I admire your purpose and dedication to ensuring your children recieve a decent and proper education..
Money, property, even power can be taken away, but knowledge once gained, is yours forever..
This is discouraging. The deeper we get into the 21st Century, the dumber we are graduating our kids. Parents need to start taking control of local Board of Education meetings and demanding better courses, better teachers, and a heck of a lot less NEA and liberalism.
Shakespeare's tough, but he set the bar over 600 years ago and has rarely been equalled. I agree with the others who believe that a well-rounded, classical education ABSOLUTELY REQUIRES studying the masters of literature. To do anything less is to deprive these students of the majesty of literature and limit them to the likes of pop-slang such as "Doh!" and "yada, yada". They deserve better. We as a society deserve better and the education profession should be hanging its collective head in shame for the dumbing down of school curricula.
Many public school administrators feel a classical curriculum is "elitist." Many schools won't use books written before 1970 because they are not PC.
The New York English Regents exam is so ridiculously PC that it asks students to answer questions on Hemingway's "The ELDERLY Man and the Sea."
Many private schools in NY used the New York English Regents exams to test their students. Now they feel they are a joke.
Face it, in many, many areas, today's public school curriculum is ludicrous.
This is perhaps a sort of grim sidelight, but I recall reading once that a study of American prisoners of war in WWII found that those who had the greatest store of memorized poetry and literature fared the best psychologically.
They were able to mentally or orally recite verses and words in their own language, share them with other prisoners who also knew them (that is, use a quote from the Bible, Shakespeare or a poet whose work most of them had been taught in childhood, such as Longfellow), draw inspiration from the memories attached to these words, keep their minds alive by trying to recall them, etc.
Today's kids, unless they are from one of the Christian groups that encourages heavy memorization of Bible passages or are home-schooled by parents like our Freeper latina4dubya, do not have this repertoire of memorized resources. All they are likely to know is the dumb grunting of hip-hop lyrics and the key lines in commercials. Hardly stuff to keep the mind alive.
Me too. When I graduated Brooklyn College years ago, we also were required to read Goethe and Moliere-- in the original German and French.
I am very grateful for that classical education and still have many books from the college courses.
Anyway, my academic experience there was certainly useful, if not career-wise, then at least in broader intellectual terms.
I think the preparation I got by doing college level work at Murrow also helped me to acclimate well to the college environment. I remember having a high school English teacher who was one of only a half dozen or so experts on Nathaniel Hawthorne.
One of my favorite cartoons of all time is one by Wallace Tripp, a very witty and learned artist - wish I could find it on line. Anyhow, Prospero is standing on a promontory over the sea, and he has just flung his book of magic off the cliff - it's sailing through the air as he recites those noble lines,
I'll break my staff;
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth;
And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book.
One of Tripp's little nosy animals in human dress (IIRC a bunny rabbit) is standing there looking up at Prospero, and says, "Mister, I sure hope that wasn't a Libery book!"
I also have a beautiful, rambunctious, young niece named Miranda. Though, I'm not sure if my sister had the play in mind when her daughter was given that name.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.