Something is rotten . . .

Friends, Romans, colleagues, lend me your eyes. I come to bury the curriculum, not to praise it. Something is rotten in the state of education. Some Ministry people kill with arrows, some with traps and some with the Ctrl-X function. What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands. “Out, damned Shakespeare”. Haven’t’st thou heard of the global credit crunch, forsooth? And anyway, what’s in a name? That which we call Shakespeare, by any other name would spell as sweet.

O, what those Ministry people dare do. What Ministry people may do, What Ministry people daily do, not knowing what they do. This is a sorry sight. Is’t really possible? Like, they can not be serious. If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

Next year will be the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this ton by Daniel Vettori. (Was there ever any man thus beaten out of season, when in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason?) Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude for the wisdom of the Ministry people. As flies to wanton year nine and 10 boys are we to th’ gods in Wellington. They kill us and our curriculum for their sport, the grey bearded loons.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. The fault, dear Teachers, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. “Yond Cassius the teacher has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much; such men are dangerous”, sayeth the Ministry people. When asked, they said, “O, they English teachers have liv’d long on the alms-basket of words. They have been at a great feast of languages, and stol’n the scraps.”

The sluttish time’s the problem, not enough of it, what with personal breaks allowed under Labour Law. Economics and Accounting we must teach because all the glisters is not gold, put money in thy purse and neither a borrower nor a lender be. And if music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, so clearly we can’t cut music from the curriculum. O, I have ta’en too little care of this. Take physics too, pomp.

See – that’s what’d happen if we took Shakespeare out of the curriculum. This would be the most unkindest cut of all. I think it was Shakespeare who wrote ‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.’ We teachers, we experts, we at the chalk-face have all been too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness. Let’s just ignore the Ministry people and teach it anyway because this above all: to thine own self be true.

— Peter Giddens