Rationale
The passionate involvement of most of my students and their families during the recent presidential campaign took me by surprise, in a very positive way. From the advent of school in August through our school-wide celebration on Inauguration Day, the classroom became a forum for lively debate and discussion. Our weekly current events reports turned from a chore to an eagerly awaited opportunity to update fellow students on breaking campaign news as we watched history in the making.
The 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama was historic for many reasons. Not the least of these was the fact that voter turnout in the 18 to 25 year old bracket was the second-highest in history (second only to 1972, the first year that 18-year-olds could vote). 1 Across the country, young people hit the streets, talked to their peers, registered voters, canvassed neighborhoods, and - most important - showed up at the voting booth. They really did Rock the Vote. Clearly American Gen X was concerned about the direction our country was going and came out to influence a change in leadership. But how did they discriminate between the candidates and their potential to be a strong effective president? What lens could they use to analyze the qualities that make a good leader? Did they distinguish between charisma and leadership? And how did they learn to differentiate between substance and spin? As Peter Sloterdijk notes:
We live in a world that brings things into false equations, produces false sameness of form and false sameness of values between everything and everyone, and thereby also achieves an intellectual disintegration and indifference in which people lose the ability to distinguish correct from false, important from unimportant, productive from destructive, because they are used to taking the one from the other.2
It is essential that today's students, who will become the productive citizens of tomorrow, learn to evaluate public figures and influential policymakers and leaders. It is necessary as well that they are cognizant of the bias inherent in much of the information coming at them.
In a media age, whether in the global electronic forms with which we are currently familiar or in "early modern" forms such as theater and chronicle history, influence - the symbolic ability to interpret a nation to itself - may be the most potent political force of all. 3
History can provide excellent examples of leadership - good, bad, and mediocre - but we can look elsewhere for a more palatable and engaging lesson from a most discerning master of human character: the Bard, William Shakespeare. In Power Plays by John O. Whitney and Tina Packer, the authors opine that Shakespeare "probed more deeply into the problems of leadership than anyone who came before him and most who came after." 4 From presidents to revolutionaries, leaders have used the words of Shakespeare as rallying points for influencing the masses. Whitney and Packer go on to enumerate the leadership models they have found in Shakespeare's writing: from Hal and Falstaff, the necessity of entering the world of one's people in order to understand them; from Macbeth, the risk of forsaking one's principles; from Julius Caesar, the dangers of inflexibility and rigidity; from Henry V, the value of rallying the followers; from Henry IV, the importance of creating and following through with a viable strategy. 5
William Shakespeare lived and wrote in an era of intense and mutating political and religious turmoil. Internecine power struggles and shifting alliances created a volatile political atmosphere until the long, relatively stable (though often repressive) reign of Elizabeth I. As the queen aged, however, concerns about her successor weighed on the minds of her subjects. The ascendency of James I to the throne was peaceful, but his subsequent policies changed the tenor of the country, leading to civil unrest and at least one thwarted assassination attempt: a bungled plan on the part of the infamous Guy Fawkes. James was in conflict with many members of Parliament; some regarded his legitimacy as ruler with skepticism and others disputed his avowal of the Divine Right of Kings. His contentious relationship with Parliament deteriorated to the point of his dissolving that body in 1611. 6
Perhaps Shakespeare's many characterizations of rulers and leaders sprang from his acute observations of the unsettled political affairs around him as well as from his deep knowledge of history. He drew upon sources such as Holinshed's Chronicles and North's translation of Plutarch's Lives as the basis for many of his history plays, tweaking details, but on the whole remaining relatively faithful to the events as they were known at the time. 7 Add to this his strong sense of plot and his insightful limning of human strengths and foibles - dignity, foolishness, power, lust, frailty. Whether a telling description of King Richard II in Henry IV, Part One ("The skipping King, he ambled up and down/With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits/Soon kindled and soon burnt…" 8) or a sumptuous account of Cleopatra on her barge (…O'erpicturing that Venus where we see/The fancy outwork nature…" 9), we find a wide range of leadership models in many of his plays, notably in what have come to be known as the Roman Plays: Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.
In Julius Caesar, Brutus speaks:
There is a tide in the affair of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Act Four, Scene 3, 217 - 223. 10
A leader needs to know what to do and when. What are the qualities we look for in a leader? How do leaders achieve their status, or lose it? What role do citizens play in the evolution of political leaders? These are questions students need to ponder. These children will be influencing decision-making in the future and we need to give them the necessary tools to help create a fair, just, and sustainable world.
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