I guess this had to happen sooner or later. Now that progressive activists and the BLM have gathered all the founding fathers and Confederate leaders for annulment, they finally had to look even further back in history for new targets. So why not Shakespeare? According to the teachers who founded the #DisruptTexts group, this is definitely a good idea. They believe that the Bard of Avon should either be removed from whole school curricula or rebranded in a way that casts significant criticism on his work as a symbol of white supremacy and colonialism. know. (Washington Times)
For the new race of teachers, William Shakespeare is seen less as an icon of literature and more as an instrument of imperial oppression, an author who should be dissected in the classroom or expelled entirely from the curriculum.
“It’s about the supremacy and colonization of whites,” said the professors who founded #DisruptTexts, a group that wants the essentials of Western literature to be removed or subjected to offensive criticism.
Anti-Shakespeare teachers say fans of the plays ignore the author’s troubled worldview. They say that Shakespeare’s readers should be asked to approach the “white” of their thinking.
A teacher from St. Paul, Minnesota is quoted as saying that she gives her students Marxist theory when they read “Coriolanus.” Another high school teacher in New Jersey boasted that she gave her students an “analysis of toxic masculinity” when she read Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare died in 1616. England was certainly a colonial power at the time, but the vast majority of Shakespeare’s work was not rooted in any celebration of its “white” colonialism. He wrote about royal families and ordinary people. What these activists are upset about is that Shakespeare was white and male. So that means he has to leave.
I will confess that I am not a big fan of Bard’s work. I had to read it at school, but it never seemed particularly convincing. I was never a fan of poetry and his plays were written in an earlier form of English, which did not exactly speak the language of a child who grew up working on a farm. But it is part of history and a basic knowledge of the classics never hurts someone looking for a complete education.
As for some lack of “cultural sensitivity” on the part of Shakespeare, give me a break. He was a product of his times and of the society in which he grew up, just like everyone else. If these teachers want to point out a specific example in Shakespeare’s body of work that is supposed to be offensive, I would be happy to take a look. The fact is that he is trying to judge a man who died more than 400 years ago against standards that were only called from the air in the last generation.
If you really want to criticize Shakespeare for something, try to solve the mystery of whether or not he wrote all his plays and sonnets. For a very long time there was a heated debate about who was actually the real author of those classic works. If you could somehow prove that he stole the work of others, or if history incorrectly attributed part of the work to him, then you might have a reason to cancel it. But it seems unlikely that such an old mystery will be finally solved.