'Hamlet' and Public Education

The U.S. public education system today does not resemble Rousseau's Émile. It resembles a Shakespearean melodrama, with stabbings, jealousies, crazy old people and alienated young people locked up together in a Gothic castle. Ah, but which play does that remind you of?

Hamlet...

Like Hamlet’s father, traditional liberal democratic education is now a ghost. Taxpayer funding for education is in slow decline. But liberals – including most teachers - cling to the vain hope that the State will reverse course and step back into the game. It won’t. The King is dead. This is irreversible, but everyone is pretending it isn’t. Education is now in the hands of conservative reformers who, like Claudius, appear as usurpers to liberal teachers. The superintendents and school boards, the foundations and the think tanks, they are committed to banning cell phones and A.I., keeping the school police and insisting on strict discipline, promoting accountability, rigor, school choice and standardized testing, banning books and LGBTQ+, and they are making schools unbearable for students and teachers.

The story of Hamlet, of course, is that Hamlet’s father, the King, is dead and Hamlet refuses to accept it. His uncle, Claudius, has assumed the throne. Worse, Hamlet’s mother is getting cozy with Claudius (there are plenty of people willing to sell out). Hamlet is depressed. His friends are depressed. Ophelia is depressed. Everyone is depressed. Maybe you know how Hamlet ends? Poison and a sword fight where everyone ends up dead, Columbine style.

This is Hamlet and the Gravediggers by Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret from 1883.