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Students don’t need Shakespeare. Knowing his plays offers no distinct advantage. What students desperately need are the skills it takes to engage with Shakespeare and other hard material: the strategy, curiosity and resilience to work through something they don’t immediately understand.
I love Shakespeare.
Even as a student. While my classmates loudly suffered through Othello, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare’s language felt magical to me, and I enjoyed piecing together what was happening.
As an educator, nearly all of my students have been assigned Shakespeare. Nearly all of them dreaded it. Many found it close to impossible to get through, plenty relied on Cliffs Notes entirely, and almost without exception they thought it a waste of time – it wasn’t relevant, and they’d never need it in “the real world.”
And you know what? They’re right.
They don’t need to know character names or settings, read Shakespearean text without stumbling, or rattle off quotes from different acts in order to have a healthy, meaningful, fulfilling life.
They don’t need Shakespeare to develop an appreciation for language, literature and the universal themes of the human experience. Those can be found in other places and spaces.
The words of Shakespeare offer no distinct, tangible value for succeeding in the 21st century, particularly when forced on resentful teenagers with no buy-in for how or why it matters. Exposure to the imagination and sheer intellect behind these works won’t make or break the quality of life or opportunities available to their readers.
No, students don’t need Shakespeare.
They need critical thinking, metacognition, resourcefulness, focus, perseverance.
None of these live inside English class. They’re the same skills a student needs for the chemistry unit that doesn’t click, the essay they don’t know how to start, the ever-intensifying course load that outgrows their old habits. Shakespeare is just where the gap tends to show up loudest.
In this sense, Shakespeare is a microcosm.
How teens experience Shakespeare can mirror their student journey overall: they get through it without getting what they were meant to out of it. They consume the content without building the skills that would have made engaging with it easier.
That’s the skills debt in miniature. Students are faced with increasingly difficult content as they move through school, especially at transition points like Grade 8 to Grade 9, or high school to university, and seldom get taught the skills to engage with it. The gap between the two compounds year over year. A teen who reaches Macbeth without the skills to work through hard text isn’t “bad” at Shakespeare. Shakespeare is revealing the skills debt they’ve accumulated.
At the end of the day, kids don’t need Shakespeare; they need the skills, attributes and mindsets it takes to do him justice.
Kelsey Komorowski is an educator and the founder of Komo, where she helps high school and university students close the skills debt and become confident, capable learners. She holds a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto and began her career at Ontario’s Ministry of Education, in the Student Achievement Division. Over the past decade, she has worked with thousands of students and been featured in The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail.
