Should Shakespeare Be Taught In Schools Essay

Are William Shakespeare’s plays still relevant enough to be taught in today’s high school English classrooms? Shakespeare is a famous poet and playwright who was born in 1564. He wrote 38 plays, 2 narrative poems, 154 sonnets and other poems. Shakespeare's script no longer exists today. Thanks to the actors in his company, half the play is completed. Shakespeare's plays were collected after his decease and preserved for publication. As Williams play wrights have aged his work has become more of a controversial topic in today’s English classrooms, recently increased teachers have stopped putting the curriculum around Shakespeare on their syllabus. When William Shakespeare’s work was written it may have not been controversial, but things have

Over the course of hundreds of years since William Shakespeare wrote his plays, they have become sexist, racist, misogynistic, and harmful to many other groups of people in society. Specifically, why his work should be considered irrelevant and should not be taught is, “We continue to cling to ONE(white)MAN’S view of life… we promote the notions that other cultural perspectives are less important” (Strauss para. 9). Of Course, this is far from the truth, all cultures perspectives are important and need to be heard by all, on the other hand though we are not promoting the opposite in are classrooms by reading and teaching this. The least we could do in our classrooms if we are still going to continue using William’s work as curriculum is have more conversations on how these types of controversial things are not accepted today. Additionally, even though the way women were treated poorly in his playwrights

Specifically, why William’s work is so complex is because, “His character and the situations they find themselves in are complex; complex enough to warrant continued investigation four centuries later,” (McInnis & Higgins para. 8). For our students' purpose to learn, it is so important that we read complicated texts like his because it teaches analysis and plenty of other skills. If students did not read old time text like this, they would have such a disadvantage when it comes to understanding older colony English. On the contrary, when it comes to teaching Shakespeare in are classrooms it may offer critical thinking, but the huge disadvantages are that the old colony English wording of his stories is extremely complicated and hard to understand. Alongside students struggle heavily with the understanding of his work, “reading stories written in an early form of the English language that… cannot always [be] easily navigated,” (Strauss para. 6). Regardless, by reading Shakespeare’s work we do gain knowledge and understanding of the language, but it takes lots of thinking, research, and conversation to fully understand the meaning of his complicated work. This is a huge struggle for many students. Shakespeare’s work has been taught in classrooms for what seems like forever at this point,