Here's an extract of a critic of the book "How the Classics Made Shakespeare" by Jonathan Bate:
> Bate reminds us that in Shakespeare’s day, a boy from a solidly middle-class family like his would have gotten a rigorous classical education even at a regional local school in Stratford. In Elizabethan England the core of education was learning Latin and then reading and translating into English the Roman classics, including Ovid, Horace, Virgil, and Cicero. It was thus largely the classics that initially shaped Shakespeare’s basic conception of literature, offering him models of lyric poetry, comedy, and tragedy that he followed throughout his career.
https://isi.org/modern-age/shakespeare-and-classical-antiqui...
"If William Shakespere had the grammar school training of his day - or its equivalent - he had as good a formal literary training as had any of his contemporaries. At least, no miracles are required to account for such knowledge and techniques from the classics as he exhibits. Stratford grammar school will furnish all that is required." Baldwin, T.W. William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke.
You could have just opened a history book book to find this out. One of those skills you learn in a bureaucratic factory farm.
What counted as formal education of the past is barely applicable to the education systems of the present. Shakespeare didn't spend half of his teen years getting coached in state and national examinations, nor were his teachers subject to performance targets that demanded test results from their students above all else.
Modern students might find a few exams preferable to this.
[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1583/education-in-the-e...
I use to coach high school policy debate in a major metropolitan public high school and the level of "I can't do this, I'm just not good at this" that shows up the minute kids encounter difficulty/obstacles, and specifically in non-physical labor, is mind-blowing.
We tell children "anything is attainable if you put your mind to it" then turn around and imply to children through our actions, cause they're good at reading those, that some people have "it" and most don't, e.g. sequestering the smart kids into completely different tracks from the regular kids; math teachers demonstrating disappointment that a student doesn't understand something while praising the kid who grasps it much quicker.
What's striking to me is that social media, and specifically IG culture, has made strides in tearing at this contradiction in the domain of personal appearance, e.g. not only weight loss/fitness transformation but even the celebration of 'confidence is all you need' for women with more robust bodies. But in the final analysis, I find physical accomplishment in our culture to still be a distinct domain from mental accomplishment.
If someone is saying they can't learn a skill they're manifestly capable of, then focusing on how they can likely do more than they think is the correct corrective to apply. However, everyone does have limits, and ignoring those limits and insisting that the same level of attainment is possible for everyone through effort is a toxic mindset which implicitly (or explicitly!) punishes people for being human as opposed to idealized automatons.
On the other hand, if someone is insisting that they can learn everything up to the highest levels and become a 21st Century Renaissance Genius, focusing the replies on how limited time is and how much there is to know is the proper corrective to apply. Apply that corrective too broadly and it's crab-bucket or tall-poppy mentality, and anti-intellectual bilge.
We do need to tear down the idea that people are inherently "good at" learned skills, however. That's never a proper corrective, it's always nonsense, and it devalues the hard work the successful people put in while demoralizing the people who wish to become successful in something.
Artisans would learn on the job, but recall that 90% of the population were peasants with rudimentary skills.
It’s popular to bitch about the school system, but the reality is we churn out nurses and doctors and programmers and engineers by the millions. Many/most of the problems are really about broader social issues that schools cannot address.
This! When I was a kid, no one thought making video games was a job, people made jokes about that. I was lucky enough to get to do it and have some success and work with many very successful people in that field. They all figured it out as they went along. Now my children are old enough to major in something that is approximately video games in college, although the name is fancier. By the way, teaching has become a great second career for my friends.
I think it is always useful to learn to think critically about anything and video games are worthy of that criticism. But I think to really succeed in a medium you have to above all else really want to do it a lot and try things no one can teach you. School can only teach you a few things you would pick up quickly if you were actually doing it.
People in this discussion keep bringing heavily educated individuals as examples of "schooling not needed". I don't know about Shakespeare specifically, but people use Bach or Einstein or Mozart as examples. People who had top education and/or came from families that made sure they were learning from early age - with teachers, tutors and formal schools.
If there is mythology alive, it is that these people had no schooling and went by raw uneducated talent purely. People just assume so and are so certain they dont even bother to verify.
> No person prior to the twentieth century had the schooling that you have and yet schooling has now monopolized the legitimization of competence and learning.
Compulsory schooling did not started in twentieth century. It existed since 18th century. Austria has it since 1774.
This isn't the joke exactly. It's a joke about what could have happened should Shakespeare at age seven had a miserable english education like many current people's experience. His argument throughout the talk is not anti-school or anti-teacher, his contention is with the arrangement of these elements that produce what we think of today as the schooling system. He's not advocating for children not to have teachers.
> Isn't the logical conclusion the opposite? That Shakespeare's English teacher was the best English teacher there ever was
If it was down to the brilliance of the teacher then that teacher could just produced more Shakespeare's throughout their career.
Shakespeare didn't have a teacher and became a genius, therefore nobody should have teachers and they will become geniuses.
It doesn't follow. Sharespeare like random other people were gifted in some way. If what others are saying is true, everyone in the olden days before widespread shooling would be amazing too. They weren't.
Why?
Because education is related to a whole load of variables. The support/lack of parents and the community they operate in. E.g. middle-class vs working class. Their nutrition level and ability to concentrate; the other kids in their classes who might support or detract from learning; the quality of the teaching in the school; and many other things.
Clearly the best way to learn is to hang around people who are passionate about their subjects but probably the next best thing is a school where you can get a balanced education that is hopefully partially related to the basic skills you need to get around in life.
And what do we do with the non-Shakespeares? I guess we just dump them and move to another part of the world... Just like little Sarah, the girlfriend of the speaker's son he mentions at 8'15.
> He [James, the speaker's son, who was 16 at the time] said 'I'll never find another girl like Sarah.' And we were rather pleased about that frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
Audience laughs and laughs at this.
I don't care for that joke either.
Yet the interesting part here is that, in some cases, it's apparently ok to intervene in your children's life -- as opposed to letting them do their thing and pursue their creativity.
Isn't it possible however, that James and Sarah would have had a child who would have become another Mozart, or Einstein?
We'll never know.
At least genetically this is unlikely. Several hundred genetic variants explain a good fraction of intelligence and a random mixing of Sarah and James’ variants will include ones that increase and decrease intelligence. Getting a really good random mix of several hundred variants is unlikely. That is, intelligence regresses towards the mean.
There is plenty of science to backup the claim that intelligence is heritable [0]. From there the rest of what I said is basic population genetics statistics.
- You cannot succeed unless you try. ( This is misinterpreted by average joe as "if I believe/try enough I will succeed, if not I didn't try enough )
- If you are a failure, it is not your fault. ( This one is the basic blame the system playbook )
Examples of exceptional people chosen specifically, Sharespeare, The Dancer, etc. Everybody thinks they have some undiscovered talent, nobody wants to be the average.
There will be some exceptional people, and with current schooling some exceptional talent will be lost, but it is much better than having less than average educated majority.
An obvious corollary is that these successful people don't owe anyone anything: all of these variables don't really matter. I don't think that's mentioned in this talk, however.
I interpreted the implication of the talk as being that Shakespeare's formal schooling, or lack of it, was at best irrelevant to his development as a great creative writer. This still supports the thesis of the talk - that the price children pay to participate in formal schooling is not worth it.
In non-writing arts, I know for a fact that there is lineage of famous artists - each learning from predecessors.
Same with Einstein, he had his problems with institutions but his breakthroughs relied on the work of their legions of average minds who developed physics and mathematics over the centuries.
We should think about how we can best support the handful of geniuses who are held back by the educational system, however I wouldn't be surprised if the kind of education that works for the >99.999th percentile would be terrible for the other 99.999%.
It should be more like:
"If you are an exceptional child, price you pay to participate in formal schooling is not worth it"
I'm sure he had help, but if it were due to the teacher, there would have been hundreds of Shakespeares from all the pupils that teacher taught throughout their career. That wasn't the case though. Out of all the pupils that Shakespeare's teacher had, only one of them became Shakespeare.
To quote Stephen Jay: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
For example, I grew up in a broken family, living with a stepmother who did her best to trip me until my father gets convinced that I should live with my mother instead. As a result, when my father was away, I received no help in my homework. Her kids did. In this scenario, the "nature over nurture" debater will argue that if I was meant to be good in math then I would be able to push through on my own without external assistance when needed. But when I didn't, my lack of understanding snowballed, my confidence got hit and I ended up being a gang member who avoids school to waste time in the arcade, smoke and pinball.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that what I'm saying is that I would have been the next Einstein or that I'm ultra-talented and I blame my stepmother for not having a math phd. But maybe I would have been good enough not to repeat the same school year twice. Maybe having access to someone explaining to me how important mathematics are to programming would stimulate my interest more and would motivate me to try and get good at them instead of dodging my responsibilities.
I dedicate my life in 2 things: Combat ageism and expose to programming as many people as possible. They don't have to want to become developers but, maybe they'll find it interesting enough to change their life or their workflows. Because I am not just a person, I'm also part of someone else's environment.
Just because their other pupils didn't turn out to be legendary doesn't invalidate the teacher's contribution, which is to say, doesn't mean the joke was in good taste.
They would not. Because many of those kids would move on to do something different. And also because success is more then just ability. Economy can not have hundreds of famous play writers, there are not enough theaters.
I think the idea you are presenting is a straw man.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170411075439/http://www.dansim...
No one will "become Bach" by attending a school with good music curriculum, and no school could have input a Bach-level talent and output a median musician.
And when he was 15, he went to prestigious school.
Also, classical music in general involves a lot of theory. It is not just about "make nice sounding tune by intuition".
Youtube has really opened my eyes on the subject as well: there are truckloads of jazz players discussing musical theory.
Which makes a lot of sense in hindsight: properly deconstructing and playing with structures is difficult if you don’t deeply understand those structures. But I’m not really musically inclined and I’ve never been fond of jazz so I never saw this.
But to play folk or rock music for example, you do not need that much of it. If you can read music sheet, you can reproduce the song. You can kinda create similar own going by intuition. But, creating the stuff Bach was creating absolutely does require tons of knowledge.
I didn't take that as the joke. Not much is known about Shakespeare's childhood but if you look at someone like Mozart he was coached by family from an early age. By seven if he had had a music class at school he probably would have been way better by the teacher. If I was to bet on it I'd guess Shakespeare was taught English way before seven.
Isn't it the point ?
That's not the joke.
The joke is, you can't imagine some teacher today tolerating Shakespeare-like talk.
See his intro anecdote. Someone fidgeting and being unruly is more likely to get medicated than educated.
> But really? Isn't the logical conclusion the opposite? That Shakespeare's English teacher was the best English teacher there ever was
Do you know that he wrote because he had the greatest English teacher? Or was it his own passion? Or did he just hate someone's guts enough. For example Harlan Ellison hated his writing teacher. I think the teacher even threw Harlan out of the class. So Harlan being the tiny ball of spite, as he was, mailed mentions of his rewards to the man, some letters even found him post-humously. Because Harlan forgot to check up on him.
I'd imagine a fidgeting and unruly student in a 16th century grammar school would get beaten.
You might even say, as Shakespeare would, that it is a "tale told by an idiot / Full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing."
I asked "So, an entire primary education can be recapitulated in a few months by an 18-year-old. Why then do we torment children with 12 years of schooling? If it isn't necessary?"
He had no answer, being a teacher himself. But I wonder.
Also, school is as much a daycare so the parents can go to work, as it is a place of "learning".
Furthermore, you study specifically to pass tests. Actual learning is a secondary side-effect of education.
Daycare exists already. If that's what we want, that's what we should pay for and get. Seem like theatre to combine the two.
That’s not exactly fair. During his primary education, he learnt enough to complete it in a few months. This does not tell how long it would have taken had he never gone to school at all.
Counterexamples to your point: Mozart, guy was copying whole compositions by memory at age 14
Adrian Lamo: didn't finish high school
Einstein?
And many others
Mozart’s father was a minor composer, accomplished musician, and skilled teacher (he published a well regarded violin textbook the same year WA was born).
Mozart started picking up musical education through his father teaching his older sister.
> Einstein?
The tutored son of an engineer, graduate of ETH Zurich?
Both of them were geniuses, but in both cases their familial background and educational access were not exactly minor.
If you’re looking for something even remotely close to an actual self-made genius, it’s probably Ramanujan you want. And here you could actually argue formal education was unsuitable and damaging: dude was only interested in pure mathematics so failed out of two colleges (as well as his FA), nearly starved until he chanced a meeting with V. Ramaswamy Aiyer (the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society).
But such stark examples are not common at all. It’s almost certain we collectively missed on a much higher number of Einsteins and Mozarts because they did not have the early access and education to blossom, than we stifled and smothered ramanujans.
Would Jacob Collier exist if he’d been born in a slum of Chennai, on the streets of Bogota, or in a project? That seems doubtful. But how many Jacob Colliers did, and were lost?
Einstein also independently discovered his own original proof of the Pythagorean theorem at age 12.
And more at Wikipedia. Point is geniuses learn way faster by themselves than going to a class. It's a huge waste of time to sit in a lecture of someone speaking at turtle pace, I would fall asleep. Sorry if you went through that.
You're generalizing from some poorly taught class, whereas it's unlikely that a genius would remain in such a class, and also unlikely that the education would not also be supplemented with other forms of teaching.
Terence Tao was a child prodigy the likes of which are rarely seen, and his bio is full of classes/teachings.
I was a child prodigy (I'm a much less impressive adult), and since I was from a rural area with divorced parents without much time for me, I spent plenty of time in 'normal' classes in addition to supplemental classes and educational opportunities.
The difference between me and my (non-prodigy) siblings was that the teachers normally didn't expect me to pay attention/I was allowed to do pretty much whatever I wanted after I finished the assignments. I have to agree with hatsubishi to a degree: It IS boring as hell to be in a classroom setting made for people behind your level, and this is especially likely to happen at early ages.
I don't think it's schools alone that kill the creativity, though. It was interesting going to events/being around other prodigies, because often I was the only kid there whose parents/adults didn't have a career already picked out for them by the time we hit middle school. The expectations of perfection, the sense that you're public property (with great gifts come great responsibility), and the social isolation of child geniuses does more to stunt them than the education system, in my opinion/experience.
Absolutely, hence why I phrased it as "unlikely". The wrong environment will kill anything.
Mozart's father, a professional composer and director, had a lot to do with Mozart's early musical development [0]
That is a pretty weak conjecture, I think. I can think of a ton of issues where the fastest way is almost certainly having the guidance and counsel of a great teacher.
Sure it's possible to teach yourself calculus, relativity theory, or even QED. I find it highly doubtful though that any student of Feynman's, for example, would have learned faster in self-study than from sitting in his class.
Einstein went to school, graduated and all that. It was only really at highest level when he went to work at that patent office.
Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
At the 7'15 point, the speaker makes a big joke about Shakespeare "being seven, being in someone's English class" and the audience rolls over with laughter -- the joke being, of course, that it's ludicrous to think anyone ever tried to teach English to the greatest English writer of all time. The speaker continues with the same idea and same joke about Shakespeare's father.
But really? Isn't the logical conclusion the opposite? That Shakespeare's English teacher was the best English teacher there ever was, because (he) helped him grow into the author we know now? That his father, or his mother, or someone, probably helped him?
Instead we have this idea that Shakespeare, like Jesus, was born perfect and that what he had to do was overcome the stupidity and shortsightedness (and meanness) of everyone around him, until he could explode and really be himself.
This idea is a tale for little kids. But it's not just absurd, it's destructive.