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How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons From a Renaissance Education
Maybe someday
38
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
32/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
Scott L. Newstok
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Date:
April 21, 2020
Challenging a host of today's questionable notions about education, Newstok shows how mental play emerges through work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through constraint, and freedom through discipline. It was these practices, and a conversation with the pastânot a fruitless obsession with assessmentâthat nurtured a mind like Shakespeare's.
What The Reviewers Say
Scott Newstok’s How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education really is a feel good book. A thick lather of the author’s enthusiasm, a comprehensive coverage of his subject matter, and the common sense inherent in his value judgments, work together to whip up a likeminded enthusiasm in his readers. It has an advantage of being a small book, easily transported in a bag.
...[a] clever new book.
...[a] pithy diatribe about the honing of the modern creative mind.
... doesn’t strain analogies or instrumentalise Shakespeare’s plays and characters to make Shakespeare seem relevant to patently unrelated contexts; rather, it explores both Shakespeare’s thinking and the ‘educational assumptions that shaped Shakespeare’ (since these frequently differ from our own system of education). At the heart of this book is Newstok’s conviction that ‘education must be about thinking – not training a set of specific skills’. After all, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so..
