Scary trends, trendy scares
Imagine if the scariest, most strictest headmistress in the world ever was scared of something. What might that be? Go on. Imagine.
You can stop imagining now. The Guardian/Observer tells us in ‘UK’s ‘strictest headmistress’ fears schools will stop teaching Shakespeare’. Stop teaching Shakespeare? Try not to do a poo.
She says:
“The point is the time will come where I don’t think [being required to study Shakespeare in schools] will happen any more,” said Birbalsingh. “I think that in America he has been lost in many places. And we are following America in this way.”
Lost in America?
How many places has Shakespeare been lost in America then? Must be loads to scare the no-nonsense-est toughy in all of education.
Most US States follow the Common Core Standards to standardise their teaching, and the problem is that the dastardly wokies in charge have made Shakespeare…
…wait for it…
…the only writer in the world that it’s compulsory to teach to grades 11 and 12.
So what’s the problem?
It probably all comes from ‘To Teach or Not To Teach: Is Shakespeare Still Relevant to Today’s Students?’ from the US School Library Journal. It discusses the usefulness of teaching Shakespeare to High School students. It also quotes:
- One former teacher who cut the amount of Shakespeare she taught (it’s not clear if any was left, or which year groups she cut it from)
- One Canadian teacher (where Shakespeare is also compulsory) who didn’t teach Shakespeare that year because there were not going to be any exams
- One teacher who stopped teaching one Shakespeare play to her 9th grade class, two years before they would get compulsory Shakespeare anyway
Now, a total of none schools dropping Shakespeare might not seem like much of a trend. Unless you’re a right wing journalist.
It got picked up in:
- ‘William Shakespeare ditched by woke teachers over ‘misogyny, racism’’ (Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post — re-run at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News)
- ‘REVEALED: How ‘woke’ English teachers have cancelled Shakespeare because of his ‘white supremacy, misogyny, racism and classism’ — and are instead using his plays to lecture in ‘toxic masculinity and Marxism’’ (our very own Daily Mail)
These stories conflate the one currently employed American teacher who dropped one play from one year group with other people quoted in the article, leaving the impression that they were all cancelling Shakespeare completely. In loads of schools. All over the place.
Like Sarah Mulhern Gross, who says in ‘No, Shakespeare isn’t being ‘canceled,’ says this teacher accused of doing it’ (Washingtion Post):
As one of the teachers quoted in the original article, I was accused of being a part of cancel culture, of being a woke teacher indoctrinating students to hate men, and of being unprofessional and unintelligent. A few hours after learning I was quoted (and misquoted), I was also the topic of conversation on a local talk radio station. I do teach Shakespeare and that’s very clear in MacGregor’s article.
Why is this a pain in the arse?
‘Right-wing figure claiming to be scared of the left banning things they’re not actually banning’ is a bit of a dog-bites-man story. You might expect to see them in the right-wing papers trying to stoke those fears, but not the Guardian/Observer. This is the paper that’s supposed to prove we don’t have a ridiculously one sided press in the UK.
What is actually happening in the US is that states are actually censoring what schools teach to remove the sort of thing Birbalsingh would decry as ‘woke’.
As of December 2021, 66 educational gag orders had been filed for the year in 26 state legislatures (12 bills had already been passed into law) that would inhibit teaching any race theory in schools, universities, or state agencies, by teachers, employers or contractors. Penalties vary, but predominantly include loss of funding for schools and institutions. However, in some cases the bills mandate firing of employees.
If there’s anything at all ‘being lost in many places’, it’s being taught that racism, sexism and homophobia are bad. Not Shakespeare, and definitely not because he’s any of these things.
Perhaps if you’re the education correspondent for one of our only not-rabidly-right-wing national newspapers, you have a responsibility to point these things out.
There’s no point going there though. Nobody tells our journalists what to write.
