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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

At my highschool we read all of Shakespeare plays. Not one paragraph a class. Not one play a year. We did a play in a week or two. We also had reading lists for summer and Christmas breaks. We were expected to read constantly. Reading is good. Forcing kids to read something they don't like, or perhaps do not fully understand, is good for them. Being able to sit down and read a hundred pages is the more useful thing anyone can get from school. And it is the thing that is least taught in modern schools.

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If your goal is simply to use the plays as a whip the students self-flagellate with until they can tolerate joyless reading, there are probably other texts better suited for the purpose. If your goal is to teach Shakespeare, the students will likely not develop an appreciation or an understanding of the significance of the plays by simply reading them.

The literal "old school" goal was to indoctrinate kids with a standard background in English literature, a common knowledge, to allow them to better communicate amongst peers of similar backgrounds. The start of this is a grounding in words like Shakespeare. In the past it would have also included the bible.

Someone can read a play and not understand it. That happens. But to understand a work you first have to at least read it. Watching can be a poor substitute, but good luck finding any modern production that performs an entire Shakespeare piece. Most everything on modern stages is heavily edited for time.

It's pretty strongly believed that they were cut in Shakespeare's day too. Something to do with limited legal opening hours and other things that had to go in the programme meaning there simply wouldn't have been time.

I have also been told that the reason Macbeth is so short is that it was probably transcribed from the working (cut) copy of the play rather than the original draft.

Reading is fine, and reading challenging material is fine, but what pedagogical value are students deriving from binging all of Shakespeare's plays, if there isn't a lot of discussion and contextual explanation to go along with it? Just saying "we read hundreds of pages of words" sounds a lot like "uphill both ways", without that.

I'm also curious as to what else y'all read, given that Shakespeare wrote 30+ plays, and at a rate of one every week or two, that's just about an entire school year spent on nothing else.

Being able to sit down and read a hundred pages is the more useful thing anyone can get from school.

I strongly disagree. A solid base in mathematics, critical thinking, and the ability to say "I'm not getting anything out of this, I should switch to something else" are far more important.

> critical thinking

is virtually useless if you don't actually know anything. One of the best ways to learn new things is by reading.

I don't think so. Reading is just consumption. You don't have to do any critical thinking, just have an imagination. Though even that's optional.

Critical thinking comes from problem solving, something a book certainly lacks.

A very narrow, specific kind of critical thinking comes from problem solving. Reading critically is a thing, and certainly part of being a well-rounded critical thinker.

You can't solve problems without knowing stuff. At least, unless you want to reinvent necessary background.

Yes, one can read without doing any critical thinking. But scientific and technical literature invite it. And indeed, require it for real comprehension. Good fiction, too.

> Reading is just consumption. You don't have to do any critical thinking

If that were true, you would believe anything and everything you read. I doubt that, barring Trump tweets, I will read a more ignorant statement all week.

Stop taking such an absurdly uncharitable interpretation of what people are writing. This is HN, don't assume others are idiots and then move on from there.

Math and critical thinking are great, but being good at those things is means little if you cannot express yourself or learn from others in your field. That requires reading.

How the hell are you supposed to gain abilities in math or thinking critically without the ability to sit down and read?

I'm genuinely confused as to the worldview that says that the earlier doesn't come with the later as a necessary cause, unless we're talking absolutely trivial levels of math/critical thinking...

Surely you understand that I'm objecting to the idea of sitting down and forcing yourself to read Shakespeare with the justification that forcing yourself to read is internally a good thing, right?

I mean, it's right there in what I wrote. How you jump to an insane, uncharitable interpretation that I'm advocating not reading is beyond me.

I was forced to read Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte in 4th grade. Luckily I already loved reading, but the experience nearly made me entirely reject the idea of reading for pleasure.

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