IMMEASURABLE OUTCOMES
Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm
by Gayle Greene
Greene offers a spirited defense of a liberal education not reducible to quantitative assessments.
The author, a literary critic and professor emerita at Scripps College, observes that society has lost its faith in the power of liberal education, once understood as the surest path to the “cultivation of the human and the creation of a citizenry capable of democracy.” Greene notes that the institution was once cherished for training students in the responsible stewardship of one’s own freedom. However, the tide of opinion has turned against it in recent years, caricaturing it as feckless navel-gazing; now decision-makers want unambiguously measurable results, usually of the kind that point to economic progress. But quantitative rubrics are incapable of measuring the fundamentally ineffable—including the manifold benefits yielded by an education in the humanities and the magic of a professor’s personal interactions with their students.Instead of “accountability,” an anodyne bureaucratic word that “refers to something that can be calculated, measured, as in a tallying up, keeping score,” Greene prefers to prioritize “responsibility,” a term that implies responsiveness and engagement and suggests the obligations teachers and students have to each other and to themselves. Without such a perspective, those who join the workforce are missing the bigger picture, a point powerfully made by the author: “Checking off boxes gets you doctors who can read numbers on a screen but can’t hear what a patient is saying; architects who fail to imagine how a housing project affects a neighborhood; engineers who fail to ask how a dam affects the population downstream; software makers who have no idea if their program can be used by nonexperts.”
Greene furnishes the reader with a concrete example of the responsibility she prizes by discussing her teaching of Shakespeare (depicted in a “composite of many classes” the author taught over the course of 40 years at Scripps College). Greene convincingly demolishes the benighted obsession with formulaic teaching assessments and astutely limns the nature of the classroom experience, a “relationship, a crisscross of relationships, two-ways, multiple ways, fraught with the complexities that come with a relationship, times ten, times a thousand.” This is the principal virtue of the book: an aversion to approaches that lack nuance or depth; Greene admirably refuses to succumb to the currents of the time. Moreover, her defense of the humanities as a devotion to an endless fascination with all things human is as philosophically rigorous as it is affectingly impassioned. At the crux of that argument is the formidable figure of Shakespeare, the “heart of humanism.” Greene writes, “I came away feeling, that’s what we love about Shakespeare, he makes us feel good about being human. It was a feeling more than a thought, a flash more than a feeling. I don’t know how else to say it, just glad to be a part of it, humanity in all its silliness, splendor, squalor, sordidness, grandeur, outrageousness.” This is an important contribution to today’s education debates and a sterling example of the intellectual virtues it valorizes.An edifying and inspiring argument for the imperishable value of a liberal education.