A Wasteful And Irrelevant Love Story Of Romeo And Juliet

Jaeone Jung Mr. Mark Olsen ENG 1302 03 March 16, 2018 A Wasteful and Irrelevant Love Story of the Past Hello Mr. Olsen, the United States Secretary of Education. I am writing on behalf of my high school to suggest removing William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet from the current high school reading list for English classes. Historically, high school education originated as a result of the Industrial Revolution, to systematically teach students additional knowledge to proceed beyond agricultural society. With an abundance of products as a result of the Industrial Revolution, demand to define justice to come up with the best model to distribute wealth has become the main philosophical issue up until today. Therefore, the purpose of reading list

Apparently, this is because the language is hard to understand and susceptible to misinterpretation. The most common quote "wherefore art thou Romeo" is commonly misunderstood as "where are you Romeo" and misinterpreted as Juliet simply missing Romeo. However, the actual meaning "why are you Romeo" is much deeper in that it questions the existence of Romeo and the essence of the feud that is hindering their relationship. One of the most popular quote by Juliet "[a] rose by any other name would smell as sweet" is such an aesthetic work of language to illustrate that Juliet is in love with Romeo despite him being named as Romeo Montague. I certainly agree that Romeo and Juliet is a beautiful work of art and is worth studying. However, the point is that teaching the language of Shakespeare in high school is too early. The ideal goal of English classes is teaching the philosophy embraced within the beautifully orchestrated language. However, in practice, most high school teachers spend too much time translating the Shakespearean language such that the course becomes more of a plot-focused class; there is not enough time to delve into the

Romeo and Juliet's tragic ending that involves suicides of Romeo and Juliet is another major problem. In the plot, the suicides - somewhat ironically - ends the feud between the two families. Death is unquestionably the most tragic incident for a human being as life never returns once lost. Therefore, death serving as the means of resolution for the tension between the two families is very depressing. Some scholars may argue that tragic endings are necessary in literature as they often reflect harsh reality and therefore draws readers to sympathize to a greater degree than other cliché happy endings. While this may be true, there are other harsh truths about current high school students: highest suicide rate, highest drug addiction rate, highest alcohol rate, highest depression rate, and etc. To briefly explain, such phenomena is mostly due to proliferation of instant gratification driven by development of technologies and, especially, social networking sites