There’s a growing movement to take white men out of literature, and the head of the United Kingdom’s largest teacher union is the latest to add to this call.
Mary Bousted of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers recently argued that English curricula should include more minority authors because minority students constitute a growing section British students. She claims that William Shakespeare was “an intensely conservative writer” and that present reading lists which feature the renowned playwright were designed by “the powerful” rather than the underprivileged.
Now, although Bousted is not charged with developing reading lists and her comments relate to the present campus climate in the United Kingdom rather than the United States, her arguments broadly reflect those that have been made in the U.S. regarding the so-called “decolonization” of school reading lists. Only last year Yale University caved into the protests of its students and altered its English literature requirements, allowing students to graduate without ever studying Shakespeare.
In order to understand this movement to decolonize school reading lists, we must first ask: What are they for?
School reading lists are usually drawn from accepted literary canons. A canon of any kind is simply a shortcut. It helps us pick out the best of the best in literature or philosophy without having to spend endless hours reading books in order to find out if they’re any good. A canon is based on the assumption that we only have a limited amount of time to read and an even shorter amount of time to learn.
Historically, the Western canon has been understood to consist of only the cream of the crop in terms of Western literary output: only those texts which have proved themselves over several centuries to contain a wisdom necessary and proper to a true education are to be included in this canon.
Because the Western canon concerns itself with essential or at least long-relevant truths, it has nothing to do with race or identity politics. Racial and class identities have changed constantly throughout Western history, so to base the Western canon on such temporary identities is absurd and shortsighted.
Moreover, it doesn’t make any sense to include works that aren’t worth reading into a canon. If anything, it ceases to be a canon and becomes just another reading list — and far less likely to educate students in essential truths.
What’s really at play is a shift from excellence-based criteria to identity-based criteria in education more broadly. Educators such as Bousted believe curricula should reflect the demographic makeup of the students, not the intellectual achievements of the country or culture in which those students presently reside. The future result of such an approach to education is that school reading lists will mirror demographic trends at the expense of ceasing to reflect excellence.
With this shift in standards from excellence to identity, we can only expect intellectual performance and cultural literacy to decline more broadly. In times where education is becoming ever more expensive, young people can’t afford to be further underprepared — even for the sake of identity politics.
