Hillsdale College offers a bevy of free online lectures and reading recommendations. Inside its Shakespeare course, taught by English department chairman and Dean of Faculty Stephen Smith, Smith elaborated on the virtues of teaching Shakespeare in a job-oriented age. Shakespeare is a stringent course in morality that shapes the souls of those who study him, Smith argued. This is what our culture and lives desperately need right now. Here are his remarks:
We need something like a new renaissance. So in the renaissance the folks went back to the sources, they went back to the proven models of excellence, the deep sources of insight and wisdom on the human condition, the human being… We need to go back to major works like Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Virgil, the list goes on and on, but go back to the sources ready and willing to learn. And I think that if we do that we will move in the direction of that new renaissance.
