Teaching Shakespeare To Five Year Old Children
Should The Tragedies Be Taught To Young Children?
In a bid to introduce the works of the great bard to a younger generation, education ministers in England have decided that William Shakespeare should be included on the English curriculum from an early age. While any teaching of this subject ahould be compulsory for our children we have to be careful in what we teach them.
To Teach Or Not To Teach
In a time when antisocial behaviour is on the rise and reports of knife crime are saturating the media, we have a duty to protect our children from violence in the society. If we are going to introduce Shakespeare to young children, we have to consider whether it is right to include the Tragedies.
One of the best ways of teaching younger children is visually, so the government is sending out DVDs and guide books with simple translations of the language. This is a good idea, as the language is one of the stumbling points in Shakespearean teaching and something that even higher education students will often struggle with.
There has recently been a graphic novel of Macbeth which shows the play visually and has speech bubbles with the important parts of the play. This gives children a chance to engage in the plot while having an image to help them. The problem inherent in this is that Macbeth is a violent play and images of Lady Macbeth's machinations or MacBeth being beheaded can be disturbing. It is not something that we should subject our children to.
It is not just Macbeth but the other tragedies that have violent scenes. In a country where the watershed is at nine-o-clock and teaching obviously comes before this time, then to teach Hamlet's ruminations on suicide or the madness of Ophelia seems to be making a mockery of our attempts to guard our children from serious subjects.
Finding A Compromise
As Shakespeare is one of the most important figures in English cultural history, children should definitely have some idea of who he was and what he did. Perhaps they should be taught about a History play such as Henry VIII, which will give them some sense of the history of their country or even Twelfth Night, with its comedic values, will give some grounding and maybe inspire them to carry on with Shakespearean studies at a later date.
If we can stir the imagination of just a minority of children, then the plan will be a success, but we need to leave the Tragedies for when they are older. Maybe then they will have some sense of where Shakespeare is coming from and understand that different forms of plays may include adult material.
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