Classic literature used to be the gold standard in education. Now, it is considered a reminder of our racist, misogynistic past, according to the woke activists attempting to hijack the public school system’s curriculum.
One group in particular, known as Disrupt Texts, has made it its goal to rid the classrooms of classic works and to “create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum.” No author is safe — not even Dr. Seuss.
One English teacher in Massachusetts, as Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote in the Wall Street Journal, successfully convinced her school’s administrators to remove Homer’s The Odyssey from its curriculum because of its alleged sexism. Another English teacher in Seattle said he would “rather die” than teach The Scarlet Letter in class.
The list goes on and on and on: Mark Twain is off-limits because of his portrayal of black people in several of his novels, most notably The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
To Kill a Mockingbird is considered a no-go because it glorifies “white saviorhood” through the character of Atticus Finch.
Lord of the Flies has been canceled because it features “elite, upperclass, private school students who are white, cisgender, European males.”
Peter Pan is off-limits because it features a racial slur.
The novels featuring Sherlock Holmes should be tossed because author Arthur Conan Doyle included racist language.
The author of the Little House on the Prairie books, Laura Ingalls Wilder, was stripped of a literary honor because of the “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work.”
William Shakespeare is a proponent of “white supremacy and colonization.”
And, Dr. Seuss’s books must be thrown out because they promote harmful “stereotypes.”
In other words, any literary work that does not subscribe to leftism’s woke agenda is irredeemable — no matter the important lessons each has to offer.
This is not education. Students must be allowed to explore ideas and search for the truth themselves, even if that truth is ugly at times. Groups such as Disrupt Texts are trying to prevent this from happening. And the question all parents should be asking is: Why?
