. . . Shakespeare.
Dana Dusbiber's statement in The Washington Post deploring the teaching of Shakespeare in high school English courses evoked universal scorn and . . .
. . . laughter.
This wrong. Scorn and laughter were far from universal. That's the problem. But let's move along.
Her thesis is simple: Shakespeare is too old, white, male, and European for 21st-century American students, especially those of color. His language is dense and unfamiliar, enough so that Dusbiber herself can't always understand it. . . .
. . . .
Commentators jumped on Dusbiber for anti-intellectualism, low standards, and incompetence. But why attack Dusbiber for voicing standard progressive premises? Her opinions are not the complaints of a narrow-minded and eccentric individual. They are entirely in keeping with multiculturalist notions.
True, she delivers a blunt and inexpert expression of them, but her conclusions and practices follow logically from the race and gender focus of reigning education theory of the progressive kind. She says nothing that gainsays the following truisms about the English class:
Students need "representation" -- black students need to see black authors and black characters (humanely portrayed), and it's best if they are presented by a black teacher.
The past is irrelevant or worse -- history evolves and mankind improves (if steered in the right social-justice directions); to emphasize the past is to preserve all the injustices and misconceptions of former times.
Contemporary literature is better -- it's more diverse and more real.
Classics are authoritarian -- they deny teachers and students the freedom to chart their own curriculum and take ownership of their learning.
Dusbiber adopts all these assumptions. Her error lay not in her ideas but in her inarticulate version of them. A more sophisticated rendition would have blocked much of the hostile response, but reached the same conclusions. We should aim criticism not at her, but at progressive education in general. Everything she said she heard before in teacher training programs. Shakespeare can't survive black teachers, and he can't survive progressive principles, either.
(Mark Baurerlein, "Progressives Shoot at Shakespeare," simplyamerica.net, June 30, 2015)
Declinism.
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