Show me an English literature teacher who does not believe in the central importance of William Shakespeare’s work to a proper education and I will show you someone who should be in another line of work. But according to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment these types exist: there are some teachers in Ireland, according to the body’s recent report, who questioned the “necessity” of making Shakespeare’s work compulsory reading in higher-level examinations.
Forcing students to pore over Macbeth, or Sonnet 19? Well, that might impose unspecified “limitations” on the “experience of the students”, these teachers suggested. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest anyone making such a case is not to fit to teach at all; but they are perhaps not the best choice to be designing a syllabus.
And reading about these so-called limitations on the so-called student experience made me wonder: what kind of “experience” do we expect our students of English literature to have if not reading Shakespeare? Is Iago’s motiveless evil getting in the way of their kayaking lessons? Are Ophelia’s spasms of madness taking up valuable time that could be spent on animal husbandry?
These teachers – abrasive and irresponsible iconoclasts that they are – might tell me off for being glib. They are simply suggesting that all the rigour required to parse Shakespeare presents an opportunity cost, where students could be reading something else.
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For example, this year I am told that instead of Othello, your main Leaving Certificate text could be Marina Carr’s Girl on an Altar – a 2022 retelling of the Agamemnon and Clytemnestra myth. Let’s work this one out together: a play with a critical reputation that has survived nearly 500 years, which has had observable influence on the literary universe we all occupy? Or one from three years ago with no chance to have made any real impact on the culture? Talk to me about that opportunity cost again.
“Shakespeare’s work can be difficult for students,” one English teacher wrote in these pages this week, nestled in a longer argument about why the playwright and poet should be made an optional part of the syllabus. Of all the people in the world to be possessed with the bigotry of low expectations, I find it particularly depressing when I identify it in teachers.
I suspect one of the faster ways to ensure your students will struggle with the great works of literature is to claim they already do, as though it is a foregone conclusion.
Thankfully, there are some redoubts against our declining standards: Minister for Education Helen McEntee is arguing forcefully that Shakespeare should remain compulsory. But she will be wading against a strong tide of low-imagination bureaucrats.
Despairing over this Shakespeare conversation, I turned to the Curriculum Specification for Leaving Certificate English, issued in August 2025. I trawled through pages of cliche (“language does not exist in a vacuum”); patronising descriptions of the student body (“enriched, engaged and competent learners”); banal truisms masquerading as insight (“students vary in their family and cultural backgrounds, languages, age, ethnic status, beliefs, gender and sexual identity”); and political ideas that might have been interesting in 2015 (students must consider “the way identities, places and groups are presented differently”).
Within all of this Disneyland guff, I detected no engagement with the meaning of the canon, nor anything about the centuries-deep tradition of literary criticism, nor even a succinct expression about what the discipline of English literature is.
If this is how we treat teenagers, is it any wonder that global literacy rates are declining, and reading comprehension skills are collapsing across the Anglosphere? These expectations are part of a broader global trend that is seeing, for the first time in decades, a reversal in our literary capabilities.
This is comprehensively evidenced: in a collation of “average scores” in high-income countries, the Financial Times found a precipitous decline in reading levels from 2012 to now. An Atlantic chart identified 2012 as a similar dropping-off point for literacy skills. And the number of American teenagers who read in their leisure time has been declining since 1985, from 45 per cent to a meagre 14ish per cent.
Meanwhile, my friend James Marriott in the London Times – from whom I have adopted a kind of collateral fury at the state of literary education – points to a study of English literature students at American universities. It found many of them could not interpret the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. This is a book, he reminds us, “that was once regularly read by children”. Dust off your copy and tell me if it really is so difficult.
Given the climate, English teachers should be arresting the pace of decline, not accelerating it. Instead, they are suggesting we could take Shakespeare out of the syllabus because students find it a bit more complicated than Gatsby. This is not just professionally foolish, but societally negligent.
