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Health & Fitness

Education Reformers believe they can play children like Hamlet's recorder pipe

Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet more or less announces the arrival of the modern self or individual and thus modernity itself when he tells his university classmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to play upon a "pipe" or "recorder" -- a version of the plastic instrument my son is learning to play in 3rd grade music in public school. Fortunately for him, he has musical gifts that still elude his tone deaf father, and, this exercise, that would have been miserable labor for me,  is fun and easy for him.

The angry joke in Hamlet, though, is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are more like me than my son, neither can play the recorder. Yet, both are currently trying to help King Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, manage the vengeful prince and his feigned "madness."

They resist, then, about the pipe; Hamlet insists.

When their irritation with Hamlet's insistence peaks, he finally explodes with a tirade that now marks us all through and through.

HAMLET

   I do not well understand that. Will you play upon
this pipe?

GUILDENSTERN

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My lord, I cannot.

HAMLET

I pray you.

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GUILDENSTERN

Believe me, I cannot.

HAMLET
I do beseech you.

GUILDENSTERN
I know no touch of it, my lord.

HAMLET
'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with
your lingers and thumb, give it breath with your
mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music.
Look you, these are the stops.

GUILDENSTERN
But these cannot I command to any utterance of
harmony; I have not the skill.

HAMLET
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of
me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know
my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my
mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to
the top of my compass: and there is much music,
excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot
you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am
easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what
instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovjeUp_AhCs

Every time we have said or thought in frustration -- "you don't know me" -- every time someone has trampled on our own sense of self -- we trace our lineage back to Hamlet and this dramatic moment.

Every time, in short, we insist on our individuality, the complexity of our lives, the mitigating circumstances seen and unseen that shape our behavior and the difficulty of communicating that individuality to the world, we embody the Danish Prince.

Indeed, our whole culture and its values and freedoms -- from the Enlightenment belief in reason, the capacity to fill up John Locke's "blank slate" through acts of individual will, to the Declaration of Independence, to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the Civil Rights Act, to our "secularized" notion that religion of any sort is "personal," matter or interiority to be respected -- emerges from the Prince's insistence that he is a self-contained being, inaccessible unless he permits accessibility, infinitely more complicated than the objects we use and ultimately manipulate to expand and express our individuality.

You think I am easier to play on than a pipe?

Hamlet's powerful rejoinder is new in history when it first appears (1601 or so -- won't be on the Common Core test which eschews literature). He materializes a new "self" in the world. Heretofore, the western European idea of the "self" had been defined by our collective relation to the divine. "We" were part of the consensus fidelium, the consensus of the faithful, the great but undifferentiated blob of humanity that was all one to God. We followed the dictum of St. Augustine, the great North African monk, who told us -- "Hands off yourself!" -- that is, don't presume you are special in God's world and can change your individual place in it.

Then Luther and the Reformation. The Renaissance. Humanism from Erasmus and St. Thomas More that gave us the "humanities," the first educational belief that one could learn and improve oneself and the world and so besmirched today by accountants. Shakespeare. And Hamlet.

Now we take it for granted, of course, that we are individuals -- like the Prince -- infinitely complex in our own way and -- while we aren't quite able to articulate that complexity precisely -- we prize it deeply nonetheless.

And we believe we have some ability to shape ourselves. And that means everything.

But, what as Tom Stoppard reminded us years ago, of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?

They are part of the picture, too, no? If Hamlet is us, so are they.

Indeed, the two friends of the Prince mark that strange, vestigial part of us that, while insisting on our own complexity as individuals, believes others are capable of  being played like a pipe, reduced to an instrumentalism that quite rightly enrages the greatest of Western European heroes.

I think of this scene when I look at my son's plastic recorder and how he manages to make even its cheaply manufactured noise sound sweet.

But I think more deeply about it when I hear Lansing talk about "career and college readiness" and the clumsy measures of standardized tests or school rankings.

 If I was to ask the Bloomfield Schoolboard to show me, for example, the exact date and time the new high school would be finished in some sort of algorithm, they would politely explain that "it doesn't work like that." Building a school is complex, there are many variables, contingencies we can't anticipate; we have to rely on the experience and judgment of our hired team and give the best estimate possible. I can see, in fact, the knowing grins in response to such a question: "You wouldn't understand how complex this is." The pool and auditorium just won't be done.

But I would understand! I promise! Shakespeare has taught me much, even about 21st century school construction.

Similarly, when Rob Glass tries to explain school closings on snow days he does a remarkable job of saying, quite simply, there is as much art as science in this. I make the best decision I can in a moment of lived experience. https://www.facebook.com/BHSchools/posts/465467290242348

In short, we extend (rightly) to the building team and to the snow cancellation decision making process a "Hamlet" like respect for the individual.

But these things are like playing recorders in comparison to teaching children.

It is perhaps time we started, then, (and Mr. Glass is very, very good at this, too) insisting that Lansing and its insane educational reform machinery start extending a Hamlet like respect to students and teachers as well. Education and growth are human, deeply human, processes, processes revealed to us long ago if the "education" experts would take the time to look or even ask.

We are not recorder pipes to be played on. And neither are our children. When you treat us and them differently you are reading for the wrong part in the play. Be the hero, not the college drop-outs paid off by deceptive King.

Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, when he gives them the lead, say, "There was a point we could have stopped and said just -- no. But we missed it."


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