Reply to Is Shakespeare not taught in DCPS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]At bottom this is a question of what belongs in the American literary canon.  What works do we expect high school students to have read to enter the world as "educated" citizens?  They can't read everything, so some choices need to be made.  I don't think that anyone would argue that the canon should be 100% Shakespeare.  But how many Shakespeare works are appropriate, given that choices need to be made?

Personally, I get the the argument that the literary canon has historically been skewed toward the experience of white Americans and Western culture.  And it should be diversified.  So that mean that some Shakespeare will probably need to be replaced with works from non-white authors.  There are plenty of great ones out there. But we need to find a balance.  Shakespeare definitely has its place.

Personally, I think that things have swung too far in the direction of reading books only from the perspective of oppressed groups.  And some books are chosen because they show diversity but they aren't challenging from a literary perspective the way that Shakespeare, for example, is, and that's not helpful.  I'm sure there are people out there who disagree.  But these sorts of pendulum swings are typical, I think, and not worth losing too much sleep over.  [/quote]

Mostly agree with what you say with a few caveats. How do you decide that a book is about the experience of white americans and western culture? do we just say white authors write about the white experience and black authors write about the black experience? that's a tad simplistic. what is the black experience, mainly racism and oppression? what is the white experience, everything that non minority? Do we put Shakespeare in the white bucket? How about Homer or Gilgamesh? why do we need to replace white authors with non-white authors? do we need to check the representation boxes on the canon so that it precisely reflects the composition of the general population? Why is the canon diversity thought of in terms of race, gender, and oppression? There are plenty of other criteria for diversifying the canon.

I am open to changing the canon, it should be fluid and reflect what is relevant today, but if we change something, it needs to be thought through, and at least as far as high school curriculum is concerned, the changes should be relatively small. [/quote]

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