From Shakespeare to Adolescence: what English texts should students study?

The text that made the biggest impact on Tapas Kant, 18, during his high school English classes wasn’t a Shakespearean classic or a speech that mobilised a nation or an Oscar-winning movie.

It was the 2015 film Eye in the Sky. Haven’t heard of it?

It’s a decent movie starring Helen Mirren that examines the ethics of modern warfare where drone operators can monitor and execute kill missions thousands of kilometers away from their human targets.

“I really like the ideas they talked about... the ethical stuff. What is the greater good?” says Kant, who was dux at his Hawke’s Bay school.

“In the context of the film, are you allowed to kill an innocent girl to save the lives of potentially a lot more?”

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Not surprisingly, Eye in the Sky didn’t make the Ministry of Education’s proposed national English curriculum released this week. The curriculum included a list of suggested texts - books, poems, speeches, film and plays - for years 7 through 13. It also proposed making a work of Shakespeare and a text from the 19th-century compulsory study in years 12 and 13.

The current list is a starting place to demonstrate a range texts that are "well-crafted, engaging works of fiction or non-fiction that exhibit literary excellence, address meaningful themes, and offer significant educational value and challenge," says Pauline Cleaver from the MoE's curriculum centre.

A fuller list for teachers to choose from, developed alongside public consultation, will be available in term four this year, Cleaver says.

Netflix also announced this week it would make its new hit show Adolescence, which looks at the influence of the internet’s dark misogynist forces on teenage boys, freely available to British high schools. (The British prime minister has voiced his support for the initiative although it is not currently part of the curriculum).

This amalgamation of events sparks questions about what texts are most relevant and engaging to students here, who gets to choose and whether a playwright born four hundred years ago and half a world away is a useful tool for New Zealand teenagers today.

Tania Roxborogh, a veteran educator and award-winning author who is investigating the decolonisation of Shakespeare for her PhD, believes there is a place for the playwright in today’s classrooms.

“Because of the whakapapa of English language and story, Shakespeare is a great starting point,” says Roxborogh, whose book Charlie Tangaroa and the Creature from the Sea made the list for years 7 and 8.

However, Shakespeare can pose some problems, especially for Māori, Pasifika, and other students from colonised lands, according to Roxborogh. Missionaries often drew from Shakespeare's work along with the Bible to justify colonisation, However, if taught through the right lens, his work can “foster critical conversations about identity, power, and cultural exchange.”

“What makes the plays of Shakespeare remarkable is their adaptability. His works can resonate with any culture...”

It can also be hard to read. Kant said he had very little exposure to Shakespeare at school, but what he did read he didn’t connect with.

“I personally am not a big fan of that type of writing.”

Roxborogh says many students initially find Shakespeare’s writing challenging. Good teaching eases students into it almost like it were a foreign language while pointing out that it's a play to be performed rather than a book to be read, she says.

Association of Teachers of English president Pip Tinning told RNZ’s Checkpoint that exposure to Shakespeare is always important, but “I think just having it as compulsory is a bit, yeah, it is a bit random.”

Along with including one compulsory Shakespeare work in the last two years of high school, the proposed curriculum - if approved - would require students to examine one 19th-century text.

“It is just apparently that one century that's really important,” says Tinning, who was confused by the inclusion.

Educational sociologist Prof Elizabeth Rata from the University of Auckland said there are some 19th-century novels that should be taught to students, including Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice.

“Good teachers can bring these novels alive to younger students and the students are introduced to the complexities, and delights of 19th-century language – including those very long sentences.”

For Rata, quality literature reflects the human experience whatever era it was created in. Students shouldn’t only study language and works that are familiar to their lives and lingo.

“When it comes to language, the purpose of teaching English is to develop students’ language, not keep them where they are at.”

Chris Tse, Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate 2022-25, is thrilled to see poetry suggested for Years 7 and 8 and beyond, but was disappointed that only three 21st-century poems made the list.

“It’s very much skewed towards the 20th century and those very classic texts, which have their merits and I think are definitely important to teach.

“But I do wonder whether at this particular stage in young people’s lives, whether they should be exposed to a very wide range of poetry, especially poets who are publishing and writing right now.”

One poem Tse has seen Kiwi students connect with is My Ancestors Ride Wit Me by Tayi Tibble. The poem references twerking, Ubers and partying while wearing copious amounts of mascara.

Award-winning playwright and journalist Victor Rodger's initial thoughts on the suggested texts was “yawn".

“There’s a few things that I was like ‘Oh yeah, cool,’ but a lot of [the texts] I was like ‘How is that relevant in 2025?’ particularly in the world that we are living in right now and particularly dealing with kids, as I occasionally do in high school.”

Rodger said he wished the MoE and teachers could pivot fast enough to include texts like the Netflix show Adolescence or anything else in current news headlines.

He gave the example of the controversy surrounding his cousin Tusiata Avia’s expletive-filled poem from 2020 about Captain James Cook. The poem celebrated the British explorer’s violent death at the hands of native Hawaiians in 1779 and fantasised about taking revenge on Cook’s descendants and other white men deemed to be murderers and rapists.

Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Book, which included the poem, became a play in 2023. It attracted the ire of ACT party leader David Seymour, who accused the then-Labour government of funding a play about murdering white people.

“That is such a perfect example of a kind of relevant controversial poem that should be studied, and that whole situation should be interrogated by students,” says Rodger.

At the moment, teachers or school English departments have the final say in what texts are used because New Zealand currently has a localised curriculum based on a national framework. The current government is switching to a national curriculum, limiting the works that can be studied in English classes to the suggested list when it is completed.

Kant, the recent high school graduate from Hawke’s Bay, wondered how students could have a greater say in choosing texts. Otherwise, they might turn to AI tools like Chat GPT to write an essay so they can pretend they studied a text that didn’t grab them.

“I feel like giving people the actual freedom to look at what they want to still teaches the same skills that you want in English anyway and to get that engagement up.”

But Rata isn’t convinced that students should have that much of a say because part of learning is about being introduced to something unfamiliar.

“If students make their own selection, then how do they select works that they have never encountered that they don't know about? That's actually the job of the teacher."