In this engaging conversation, Scott Newstok, a Professor of English and author of "How to Think Like Shakespeare," explores the timeless insights of Renaissance education. He critiques the limitations of modern education and champions a more immersive approach that prioritizes language and creativity. Scott highlights how imitation can lead to originality and how constraints, like those in Shakespeare's sonnets, can foster innovation. He encourages lifelong learning and intellectual engagement, emphasizing the importance of dialogue with historical texts.
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insights INSIGHT
Modern Education's Focus on Testing
Modern education systems prioritize testing, hindering deeper learning.
This focus on short-term goals sacrifices human flourishing and independent thought.
insights INSIGHT
Fragmented Feedback in Education
Students today are primed for fragmented feedback, hindering holistic evaluation of writing.
This reduces writing to a checklist instead of a lifelong craft.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Poet Fails Her Own Test
A Texas poet whose work appears on standardized tests says she'd fail them herself.
The tests misinterpret her poetry's meaning.
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This book challenges modern educational practices by highlighting the formative habits and practices that shaped minds like Shakespeare's. It explores how mental play, creativity, autonomy, innovation, and freedom can emerge through work, imitation, tradition, constraint, and discipline. Newstok draws on Shakespeare's world and other writers to distill enduring practices for deeper thinking and more effective writing.
The World Beyond Your Head
On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Matthew Crawford
Matthew B. Crawford
In 'The World Beyond Your Head', Matthew B. Crawford investigates the intense focus of various professionals such as ice hockey players, short-order chefs, and organ builders, as well as the behaviors of gambling addicts. He argues that our current attention crisis is a result of certain assumptions in Western culture that are at odds with human nature. Crawford emphasizes the importance of embodied, social, and situated experiences in forming the self and argues that genuine agency comes from voluntary submission to realities beyond one's own head. The book has implications for how we raise children, design public spaces, and understand democracy[2][4][6].
When we think about the Renaissance, we think of a great flowering in artistic creativity and intellectual innovation; we think about the beautiful paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo, the astute discoveries of Copernicus, the timeless plays of Shakespeare.
Ironically though, this great creative flowering was spurred by men who were educated under a system that, by our modern lights, can seem rather rigid and rote.
My guest today unpacks this seeming paradox. His name is Scott Newstok, and he's a professor of English and the author of How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons From a Renaissance Education, in which he uses the Bard as a jumping off point to explore broader insights into matters of the mind. We begin our conversation with the ways Scott thinks our modern educational system is lacking, and how students' approach to learning has changed over the years. We then discuss how the Renaissance model of education, with its emphasis on language and verbal fluency, provides possibilities for strengthening our reading, writing, speaking, and thinking skills and making their refinement a lifelong habit. We delve into how artists and thinkers in the Renaissance thought about originality differently than we do, and how they believed that imitating and even copying the work of others can actually help you find your own voice. And we discuss how Shakepeare's sonnets demonstrate the way in which constraints can counterintuitively enable creativity. We end our conversation with how you can incorporate Renaissance thinking into your day to day life.
The Art of Manliness 
