Stop Trying to Teach Shakespeare (& Other Inaccessible Classics) to Teens & Preteens

I bet your jaw has dropped. “But Brooke, you’re an English major! You read Charles Dickens when you were 10 and were obsessed with Jane Austen in high school (and let’s be honest, all the way through college)! Surely you want to make sure that every student reads Shakespeare and the great classics of English literature! Especially at a young age!”

Hahaha – no. I don’t.

In fact, I think it’s a huge mistake and a major blow to literature that we try to teach incredibly difficult and often inaccessible classics to middle schoolers and high schoolers. I think it turns them off from literature and ends up stunting their analytical and paper-writing skills.

But this is me, so get ready to have my position explained and defended.

Let’s start with explaining which books I’m classifying as “inaccessible classics”.

Here are some of the books/plays/works (from my memory and in no particular order) that I was assigned in middle school and high school that, in my opinion, shouldn’t have been:

Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Crime & Punishment (still not entirely sure how our teacher got us through this book as sophomores!), The Scarlet Letter, Beowulf, Ralph Waldo Emerson essays, Walden, The Sound & the Fury (how the heck we read this when I didn’t hear the phrase “stream of consciousness” for another few years astounds me), The Canterbury Tales

To be clear, I completely understand where educators are coming from when they decide to teach classics. In America, we’re still not at 100% levels of high school graduation. Literature, despite the arguments of legions of book-haters, plays a major cultural role and enacts a significant influence on the development of our culture. It even helps shape our understanding of the world around us – just look at how we refer to people’s “white whales” and talk about “going down the rabbit hole”.

It can be tempting to try and teach the classics to kids when you know you can, as opposed to hoping that they’ll experience those classics eventually.

But there are 3 reasons I say pass on the classics when it comes to teens and preteens:

1. Those are “inaccessible” classics for a reason. If there’s anything I work very hard on, it’s that I try to be careful when I use a potentially loaded adjective like “inaccessible”. I’m using it for a reason. The classics are usually decades or centuries old, from cultures that are very unfamiliar to today’s teens and preteens. They often use language or references that either confuse these younger readers or go right over their heads.

Worse, they are often barely prepared to read and analyze these works, with only cursory historical background, not the immersion that you’ll usually find in college programs. The result is that the students often struggle to understand the value of the work, if they even read it – and that’s a big if, especially when the classics have lots of resources they can use to pass the perfunctory reading quizzes and essays expected of them.

So we’re placing so much emphasis on the classics for what – a bunch of people who are supposed to have read a lot of the great classics but didn’t because they were 14?

Honestly, I’d much rather we teach fewer “respected” classics in favor of books that students might actually read and learn some valuable analytical and critical thinking skills from. I’d like to see books that don’t intimidate teachers with pressures to simplify incredibly complex works that challenge lifetime scholars in order to make them somewhat accessible to younger students.

2. Middle school and high school teachers usually are teaching the classics incorrectly. I’m not trying to suggest that middle school and high school teachers suck; instead, they’re trying to teach complex, complicated texts to students who are still developing cognitive, emotional, and critical thinking skills on a tight schedule with limited resources.

Therefore, a lot of students are taught that: 1) there is one “answer” to a literary text, 2) this “answer” often involves being able to correctly interpret a confusing code that’s unfamiliar to most teens and preteens (this is especially true with poetry), and 3) the safest course of action is to know the basic plot points and to repeat whatever the teacher says during class.

As an English major: no. Nonononono. That’s not how literary analysis works. There is never one “answer” to a work – in fact, that’s what defines great literature – multiple interpretations.

Seriously, I didn’t learn how to really analyze a written work until I was a sophomore in college. It wasn’t that I was a crappy English student – it was because I had focused more on the skills to figure out what argument my teacher wanted me to repeat on paper than on engaging with the text.

Again, it’s not necessarily a sign of poor-quality teachers (I went to a good high school with strong teachers), but, I think, of attempting to fit a square peg into a round hold.

3. If the students do go on to college, you’ve just helped them double-dip on their literary studies and possibly miss out on discovering other corners and kinds of literature. I kid you not. My first bunch of English classes involved re-reading a lot of the works I’d been introduced to in high school. You could say that that was a sign that my AP classes succeeded and introduced me to texts I’d study in college – to me, that’s a redundancy that meant I missed an opportunity to discover and analyze another work.

In addition, I really regretted that so much energy was spent on the classics once I started studying “other” literatures – women’s literature, modernist literature, African literature, Caribbean literature, and black women’s literature (pretty much anything that wasn’t written by white male Americans from New England – and all classes that I highly, highly recommend). What bothers me is that the vast majority of the classics taught end up continuing what was, historically, an imbalanced literary canon (in favor of white males). There’s been a lot of work in academic circles to change this to be more inclusive to other writers, and some of this has percolated into middle and high schools, but look again at that list at the top and tell me if any of those writers isn’t white or male.

Again, it’s not necessarily our teacher’s fault – just as literature helps shape culture, our culture helps shape literature. For a long time, our culture unabashedly and unrestrainedly favored white men over anyone else – it’s no surprise that what became defined as great literature was dominated by white men. Even changes that started incorporating non-white and non-male literary voices only really started gaining the steam later in the twentieth century, meaning that these “classics” are still relatively new.

And one more point, because this is what really bothers me: I hate the way Shakespeare is mishandled and mis-taught to millions of students every year. From studying Shakespeare in middle and high school, I learned that: Romeo & Juliet was a tragedy purely because their family conflict doomed them from the start; Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech was about suicide; and Polonius was just confused sometimes. I was never informed of the many, many sex puns rampant throughout R&J that undermine the “pure tragedy” interpretation (although that future revelation was foreshadowed by an unfortunate performance of a rock n’ roll version my freshman year of high school, when poor Romeo popped a boner during his scene in the tomb with the “dead” Juliet), nor was I informed that there’s still not total consensus on what Hamlet’s famous speech is about. No one even bothered to point out that Polonius is a fool – a talkative, self-contradicting, bloated-by-his-own-sense-of-importance fool.

Shakespeare is a difficult writer to deal with even for those who study him for years. Why are we so insistent on teaching him to young students, especially when doing so leaves out so much depth and dimension to the plays?

I’m all in favor of trying to introduce students to the beauties of literature. I just wonder if we have to do so by forcing them to “read” classics that are largely inaccessible to them, won’t be taught well, will leave them with grave misconceptions or missed elements of the work, and will perpetuate gender and racial imbalances that have too long continued.

I’d much rather that we focus on teaching students to enjoy books and to think critically about what they read rather than instilling in them a sense that they aren’t adequate for the books they’re “supposed” to read.