A high school English teacher is refusing to teach Shakespeare because he was white and has been dead for 450 years.
Dana Dusbiber, an English teacher at a large inner-city high school in Sacramento, California, recently published an editorial in the Washington Post that is prompting outrage from other teachers, as well as many who consider Shakespeare one of the most influential writers of all time.
“I am sad that so many of my colleagues teach a canon that some white people decided upon so long ago and do it without question,” writes Dusbiber, who teaches at Luther Burbank High School.
“What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important,” she argues.
Dusbiber says she prefers “ethnically-diverse writers who tell stories about the human experience as it is experienced today.”
After receiving complaints about the editorial, the Post published a response from another high school English teacher.
“To dismiss Shakespeare on the grounds that life 450 years ago has no relation to life today is to dismiss every religious text, every piece of ancient mythology (Greek, African, Native American, etc.), and for that matter, everything that wasn’t written in whatever time defined as ‘NOW,’” writes Matthew Truesdale, a teacher at Wren High School in South Carolina. “And yes– Shakespeare was in fact a white male. But look at the characters of Othello and Emila (among others), and you’ll see a humane, progressive, and even diverse portrayal of the complexities of race and gender.”
While Shakespeare is required study for high school students under the Common Core English Language Arts standards, a new report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) finds that many English majors at colleges and universities across the country can graduate without reading his work.
The vast majority of English majors at colleges and universities in the United States are not required to take a course focused on Shakespeare. The ACTA report surveyed English departments at 52 leading universities and liberal arts colleges and found that only four of them require English majors to take a course focused on Shakespeare. Those four universities are Harvard, University of California-Berkeley, U.S. Naval Academy, and Wellesley College.
The report also finds that many universities increasingly require students to study “non-canonical traditions,” “race, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity,” and “ethnic or non-Western literature.”
