Lessons for Today from Shakespeare’s Classroom: Empowering Learning Through Drama and Rhetoric

This volume explores the relationship between the emphasis on performance in Elizabethan humanist education and the flourishing of literary brilliance around the turn of the sixteenth century.

This study asks us what lessons we can learn today from Shakespeare’s Latin grammar school. What were the cognitive benefits of an education so deeply rooted in what Demosthenes and Quintilian called ＂actio＂--acting? Because of the vast difference between educational practice then and now, we have not often followed one essential thread: the focus on performance. This study examines the connections relevant to the education offered in schools today.

This book will be of great interest to teachers, scholars, and administrators in performing arts and education.

Robin Lithgow was the first ever Theatre Adviser, and later the Director, of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Arts Education Branch. In that role she and her colleagues were the architects of the Elementary Arts Program, serving every one of over 550 elementary schools, with itinerate teachers in dance, music, theatre, and visual arts.

She is the daughter of Arthur Lithgow, perhaps the only person ever to have produced every play in Shakespeare’s canon. She is the sister of the theatre and film actor, John Lithgow.