High-School Teacher: Stop Teaching Shakespeare Because He’s a White Man
Lord, what fools these mortals be!William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Act 3 scene 2Shakespeare's Works -- Too Hard, Too White
by KATHERINE TIMPF June 16, 2015
A veteran teacher at Luther Burbank High School, the biggest high school in Sacramento, Calif., is proposing that high-school teachers stop teaching Shakespeare because he’s just some old white guy who died a long time ago so what could he know about anything.
In a piece published in the Washington Post, Dana Dusbiber explains that we should “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely” because she “[does] not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach [her] students about the human condition.”
“What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important,” she writes.
Why she seems to consider not teaching Shakespeare at all and teaching only Shakespeare to be the only two options here is unclear. After all, it seems to me like you could assign Shakespeare and works from “other cultural perspectives” — but hey, what do I know.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/shakespeare-white-stop-teaching?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral
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