Why Read Shakespeare?

Why read Shakespeare? Russell Dean Schultz, at least, has an idea. The man he is responding to, Mac McCann, argues we shouldn't read Shakespeare because he's hard, and reading hard texts make it difficult to develop "critical thinking" skills.

"Critical thinking" -- the great evil of our education system. What is it? It's hard to say. It's a postmodern response to the rejection of logic, reason, and philosophy. It is an excuse to argue against reading anything of any importance whatsoever.

Why read Shakespeare? Perhaps "critical thinking" is not the skill to be developed by reading Shakespeare. Perhaps there are other reasons to read Shakespeare. Perhaps by reading things that are difficult, your reading skills will improve. Perhaps by reading Shakespeare, you will discover how much of our culture was created (or at least recorded and passed on) by Shakespeare. Perhaps by reading Shakespeare, we can learn something about what it means to be human.

Perhaps, though, those are things our public education precisely do not want to teach our children. Either that, or those teachers who don't want to teach Shakespeare are either too lazy or too stupid to understand his beautiful works. A good teacher does not find many students who hate Shakespeare. Bad teachers, though, to cause students to hate Shakespeare -- or reading in general. Teachers, don't blame Shakespeare if your students hate to read -- blame yourself.

Of course, it's much easier to blame Shakespeare.