Scott Newstok, How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.
This is a book that does not fit neatly into any established genre. Above all it’s about how to think and how to teach people to think, but it’s not a how to manual. At a time when higher education is stampeding toward everything shiny, new, and up to date, this book is deliberately backward looking. It looks unapologetically to the past for ideas, models, and habits of mind that Newstok contends are just as relevant now as they were in Shakespeare’s time. Even the form the book takes, that of a commonplace book (though it has more narrative and commentary from the author than is typical of the genre), is deliberately anachronistic.
For our readers who are not in the humanities, a commonplace book is a collection of excerpts of other people’s work. They go back to antiquity, but became intensely popular during the Renaissance and only faded from use in the last century or so. Many were made for personal use only—a type of private intellectual scrapbook of compelling ideas. Other commonplace books were less personal; they were complied with readers in mind and were published.
Because we are not accustomed to the commonplace book genre anymore, the book takes a little getting used to. At first, I did not realize that the italicized passages were quotations. In fact, in the first couple of pages I found myself thinking, “Man, he’s kind of overdoing it with the all the italics. This looks like a book that an overzealous undergrad went nuts on with a highlighter.” Because there is so much quoted material (it’s the nature of the genre), all of which is cited in footnotes, your eye is dragged to the bottom of the page constantly. It’s not the sort of thing we are accustomed to reading. After a while you get used to it, but at first I found it a bit jarring.
The whole premise of the commonplace book is that the ideas of others—established, time-tested ideas—have value. In fact you could call the book derivative. It is consciously and intentionally builds on a scaffolding of ideas erected by others. That notion, the idea that there is value and wisdom in the past, is central to this book. In fact the book seems to be reacting against almost every new direction in higher education. But it is not just a conservative complaint about the dangers of new stuff; instead it celebrates the value of traditional education and shows how the habits of thought that a real liberal education offers continue to have value and relevance in a changing world.
Readers of Bad Assessment will like Chapter 2, which is a critique of the utilitarian view of education. In it, Newstok describes asking his daughter, aged seven, if she had learned any new words at school:
This otherwise vivacious child contemplated a moment, looked at us coldly, and whispered: assessment.
In this same chapter he points out that Shakespeare’s limited formal education, which consisted mostly of drilling on Latin grammar, would seem to be the epitome of useless learning, even in his time. Nonetheless, it managed to prepare the young Shakespeare for a career as a professional playwright, a job that did not even exist at the time he was in school. Paul Banksley, the satirical advocate of 22nd century skills, should take note.
Newstok’s point is well taken. We tend to assume that our problems are new ones, but as he shows us, people in the past have had to deal with very similar issues and dilemmas. Thoughtful people in earlier ages produced ideas and ways of thinking that we can use now to address our own problems.
Inevitably in reading a book like this one thinks of quotations that ought to have been included but were not. For me it was Confucius’s statement that: “The accomplished scholar is not a utensil.”
So, read the book. Then send me the quotation that you think should have been in it, but was not. If I get enough, I’ll create a “commonplace page.”
Note: This is the second book review that has appeared in Bad Assessment. If anyone has ideas about books that ought to be reviewed or would like to review a book for us, let me know.