Greene, Gayle. Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm. John Hopkins University Press, 2023.
Gayle Greene’s Immeasurable Outcomes is a book that’s full of surprises. Its subtitle, “Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm,” combined with Greene’s pedigree as professor at a liberal arts college, gave me reason to expect a defense of the humanities in opposition to the empire of quantification that has become en vogue among the educational establishment. In that, Greene does not disappoint. What I did not expect, however, was Greene’s methodology. She takes her readers on a journey through an academic semester in one of her Shakespeare seminars, charting a course from her first impressions of her students to the moments after her final class, with many of the same students lingering in the room and continuing the conversation. By the end of the book, I found this surprising methodology delightful.
Greene pairs her assessment of the problems in education today with a proposed anecdote: the small liberal arts college. Her description matches many of the elements that make up a healthy classical K-12 Prep school: teachers who invest in the lives of students; conversations centered on great texts; transformative insights into what it means to be a human being; friendship and community; the cultivation of attention; and care for the human person. Despite all that’s working against it, this kind of education is still making a difference. True, Greene cannot help but bemoan the difference between kids nowadays and those of days gone by. But she does so with self-awareness and with a deep optimism about the seemingly small, unquantifiable transformations that occur within a human person as a result of even a single course on Shakespeare’s plays. Those soul transformations, she argues, translate to results that may be quantifiable in the long run, but in a far less direct and immediate way than in technical or scientific fields of study. Yet without the humanities, Greene maintains, we risk an extremist society in which people cannot tolerate opinions other than their own, in which personhood is crushed beneath the weight of impersonal bureaucracies, and in which we seek neither the good of the other nor the common good, but mere self-interest.
Greene connects this argument intelligently to the way that K-12 schools, colleges, and universities are currently evaluated. She observes that an inability to hold competing realities in tension, to sit with the uncomfortability of uncertainty is at the root of our contemporary obsession with data and measurement. Shakespeare is thus an anecdote to our present-day ills, for he is an author who possessed, as Keats puts it, “negative capability,” which Keats defines as being capable of holding “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” By contrast, a lack of trust in human(e) judgment has resulted in a kind of bureaucratic implementation of impersonal processes, inane distinctions, technical jargon, and high-stakes quantification that represents a kind of insanity. She then proceeds to demonstrate how the liberal arts are currently being undermined by this educanista politburo. Here Greene cannot help but divulge her partisan perspective, a disappointing surprise that some readers will need to look past, for she lays the blame for this undermining at the feet of right-wing educational policy since Reagan and the implementation of standards-based testing and accreditation.
But more deeply, Greene views our educational failures as an abdication of responsibility in exchange for accountability, a checking of boxes in lieu of attending to persons. In the end, our Shakespearean “negative capability,” our capacity for dealing with uncertainty is commensurate with our capacity for attending to the human person. Persons are messy, inchoate, and conflicted. If the goal of a liberal arts education is the cultivation of the human person, then expecting it to match the structures of corporate-style objectives or economic results is so reductive that it completely obscures the real work of liberal education. What’s worse, Greene maintains, is that the problem is not merely an intellectual one. It’s a practical, existential threat to educators in their daily lives. That’s because the burden of implementing these wrong-headed programs falls squarely on the shoulders of teachers, who must complete reams of paperwork, attend committee meetings, and navigate an increasingly complex labyrinth of rules and regulations. To support the assessment bureaucracy, more non-teaching administrative staff need to be hired, siphoning precious resources away from the classroom.
Greene also makes a positive case for the liberal arts. To make that case, she presents the evidence of her own classroom. That evidence is testimony, not data. And her testimony is ultimately compelling, though I confess that her descriptions of seminar left me lamenting the extent to which classroom discourse has devolved in the past twenty years. Still, Greene’s manner of presenting the comments and mannerisms of her adolescent students alongside her own, wiser internal monologue is one of the more delightful features of the book. For anyone inexperienced with the complexities seminar leadership, her articulation of the million micro-decisions that a seminar leader must make is its own case for the dignity of the profession and the need for human judgment that cannot be reduced to a standardized objective.
Greene rightly wants her readers to see just how messy and complicated teaching is, and she wants us to see how genuinely encountering a complex author like Shakespeare, especially when accomplished in conversation with others, can foster the kinds of mental and interpersonal habits that lead us to a more humane society. I agree with all that. But one does want to press her a bit on the art of teaching. Aren’t there some principles, however generalized and in need of prudential application, that one could give to a newbie teacher?
To be fair, that’s not really the purpose of the book. Greene is not writing a how-to guide. Immeasurable Outcomes is more a memoir than a manual. Classical K-12 educators will find a great deal of common ground in Greene’s book and, overall, a largely shared understanding of the goals and value of a liberal arts education, as well as a keen evaluation of contemporary problems in education more generally.
Paul Weinhold has been a teacher and leader in classical education movement for the last twenty years. He is Director of Continuing Education for Great Hearts America and Founder of ClassicalEd Review.