The nearness of Shakespeare’s thinking: a conversation with Scott Newstok on the Bard’s not-so-distant education.

Humanities Watch: What motivated you to write How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education?

Scott Newstok: The book grew out of a convergence between my teaching and my parenting. Over the past decade, I’ve been reading a lot of great work about Shakespeare’s career, from pedagogical practices to the marvelously collaborative nature of theater. This inspired me to reshape my teaching, to help students approach him as a maker: a play-w-r-i-g-h-t. During this same decade, my own kids have been progressing through elementary and secondary school. Some of the frustrating educational reforms they’ve confronted strike me as jarringly at odds with the still-beneficial aspects of a Shakespearean education. These strands of thought came together when I was invited to speak to the incoming students at Rhodes College, which led to my 2016 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education — and now to my book.

HW: How would you characterize its general theme?

SN: “Assessment” is a desiccated — and ultimately counter-productive — way to discuss vibrant habits of mind. “Craft” better articulates how thinking unfolds. We need to amend the impoverished way we’ve come to talk about one of the richest human endeavors. A more vibrant vocabulary could help make a better platform of teaching, to invoke one seventeenth-century educator’s evocative phrase. A platform ought to raise us up, not just sell us stuff: “And here I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high.”

HW: You outline Shakespeare’s “education” under fourteen headings. The first is “thinking” and the last is “freedom.” How does this education liberate thinking?

SN: To be clear, the chapters are less a rigid program of fourteen ‘steps’ in an education, more an essayistic series of meditations on some key features of thinking: “fit,” “place,” “attention,” “technology,” “imitation,” and the like. To your question: I ended the book with a chapter on “freedom” because I’m eager to counter a naïve romanticism (“the unformed child is perfect”) as much as a too-narrow technologism (“the end of learning is to contribute to the economy”) — both of which mar current ways of thinking about education. A Shakespearean education gives us the chance to build habits of mind that individuals (and cultures) need if they’re to flourish. We all need practice in curiosity, intellectual agility, the determination to analyze, commitment to resourceful communication, historically and culturally situated reflectiveness, the confidence to embrace complexity. In short: the ambition to create something better, in whatever field. Ultimately, education ought to exercise us in the crafts of freedom, helping us reach our fullest capacities to make by emulating aspirational models, stretching our thinking as well as our words. Anything else is a curtailment of our birthright.

HW: Throughout the book, you take issue with current educational practices and commonplaces. Which of these practices are the most pervasive? pernicious?

SN: So many buzzwords, so many clichéd phrases, so much stale thought . . . whenever I wade through such jargon, Orwell comes to mind: “if you just let the ready- made phrases come crowding in, they will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.” If I had to choose one? I guess it would be the notion that there’s such a thing as “skill” abstracted from contact with meaningful content (and here I’m just echoing E. D. Hirsch, Natalie Wexler, and others).

HW: How can the humanities help us re-think the place and importance of a liberal arts education? of STEM?

SN: “Shakespeare” (and literature, and the humanities, more generally) must not be seen as somehow the “opposite” of science. Our modern divisions of knowledge emerged only in the last couple of centuries. Before then, everyone in college learned the classical liberal arts. That meant both geometry and grammar, both physics and philosophy. They’re not opposed to each other; they complement each other. Chemistry Nobel Laureate Thomas Cech invokes the athletic “cross-training” analogy between body and mind: “Academic cross-training develops a student’s ability to collect and organize facts and opinions, to analyze them and weigh their value, and to articulate an argument, and it may develop these skills more effectively than writing yet another lab report.” All of this wide-ranging education was designed with an eye toward becoming makers, preparing you for a vocation of making — whether a maker of objects or a maker of words. You learn from master teachers (intellectual craftspeople) how to hone past traditions to make them your own.

HW: For many of your readers, Shakespeare will appear to be a remote figure. Would you comment on how his ongoing importance helps us re-consider the nature of “remote learning,” as we now practice it?

SN: That’s an intriguing link! The book does ponder how “close learning” differs from “distance learning”; education has always oscillated between these modes (a version of Spitzer’s old “philological circle”). At times we benefit from an immediate, intensive proximity; but we also require some zooming out, with space and time to think, away from the pressures of immediate proximity. I guess what’s most worrisome to me about our current moment is that we’ve all been forced almost entirely to the “remote,” and while it’s not impossible to recreate some of the experience of proximity online, I think many of us are finding it more challenging (and time-consuming) than anticipated. As to Shakespeare’s remoteness: any dead writer is “remote” to us, all the more so the further you go back in time. His isolation in the curriculum (too often, as the only non-prose, non-American, non-contemporary writer assigned) reinforces his verbal and cultural remoteness. These are particular challenges deriving from the way literature is taught overall — not just Shakespeare. But I remain convinced that a deliberate engagement with the past helps you close that distance, and make up your mind in the present. As one 16th-century writer held, reading a book is a conversation with the deceased, where you listen to the dead with your eyes. Or, as Auden put it, “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”

HW: You discuss the nature of rhetoric throughout the book, e.g. “in Shakespeare’s era, rhetoric was nothing less than the fabric of thought itself. Rhetoric wasn’t just part of the curriculum; it was the curriculum” (29). What do you mean by “rhetoric,” and how can this meaning lead us to appreciate the role of the humanities in education?

SN: Traditionally, rhetoric’s been characterized as the art of persuasion (first verbal, then eventually written). Unfortunately, we now either consign “rhetoric” to tedious catalogs of literary terms or, worse, identify it with empty promises — things politicians say but don’t mean. But because thinking and speaking well form the basis of existence in a community, rhetoric prepares you for any occasion that requires words—it’s the craft of future discourse. Once you acknowledge this capacious sense of rhetoric, you recognize it demands endless hours of practicing a full arsenal of strategies for encompassing a situation: imitating vivid models, exercising elaborate verbal patterning, practicing imaginative writing, and building up an enormous inventory of reading. Fierce attention to clear and precise expression is the essential tool to foster independent judgment; indeed, “precision of thought is essential to every aspect and walk of life.” That is rhetoric.