Establishing the Folger Education Programs

PEGGY O'BRIEN: The Folger is this wonderful jewel of a place. It has a collection that is not like any other in this country, but it also has the interest in interpreting that collection for all kinds of audiences. And for a very long time, in the first 50 or so years of the Folger’s existence, they focused on the general public and also on the scholarly community, as well they should. And then they started a program for young kids, elementary school kids. When I first came there, that was the only education program that was there, and I thought, “How can you have nine-year-olds doing cut versions of Shakespeare?” But of course you can, and it’s fabulous because they’re not afraid of the language. Macbeth is the perfect play for nine-year-olds, which is, you know, bloody murder in the best kind of fantastical way.

But they hadn’t thought much about high school or middle school and so I happened along there, having been a high school teacher, and said, “Gee, shouldn’t this institution think about doing something for teachers in that situation, because it’s hard to get out of middle school and high school without reading at least, or experiencing at least, a couple of these plays?” So the Folger went forward in a big way and they understood that appreciaters of Shakespeare and devotees of Shakespeare don’t arrive on earth at age 30 with a briefcase, that their real love and hunger and thirst and fascination with that playwright begins much younger and in some places, for some people, it begins at home, but for lots of people it begins in school. Most people experience Shakespeare for the first time in school. So, to pay attention to the care and feeding and development and nurture of those teachers was an important thing for the Folger to do.

I was there at the time running the education programs and I had the fabulous opportunity of making them up, which was just wonderful for somebody like me. So we started with, we had this festival which was like the pageants in 1916 for younger kids, nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-olds, and then Louisa Newlin, who was a wonderful volunteer, and is a fabulous teacher herself, said, “Well, why don’t we do this for middle school and high school students?” So we started the Secondary School Shakespeare Festival, and then the Student Shakespeare Festival, which was the younger kids. And those are all now, each one of those is twenty years old, and that’s for local students and teachers. They work on scenes in their school and they come and perform for each other, and they’re the most fabulous audience for each other.

And then nationally—of course there are the Folger editions, which are wonderful, and the library has just finished a whole new round of those, but also the Teaching Shakespeare Institute, which the National Endowment for the Humanities funds in the summer, has reached hundreds of teachers all over the country. And they come and study in a rigorous kind of a program for a month in the summer and they live in a dorm at Georgetown University. And they study with a faculty and inside a collection which only the Folger could put together.