WHO NEEDS SHAKESPEARE? A high-school English teacher caught flak for bragging in the Washington Post that she refuses to teach Shakespeare and believes he doesn’t belong in the curriculum. But Mark Bauerlein says her critics are wrong to focus on her. She’s merely following the principles she learned in teacher training programs:

  • Students need “representation”—black students need to see black authors and black characters (humanely portrayed), and it’s best if they are presented by a black teacher.
  • The past is irrelevant or worse—history evolves and mankind improves (if steered in the right social-justice directions); to emphasize the past is to preserve all the injustices and misconceptions of former times.
  • Contemporary literature is better—it’s more diverse and more real.
  • Classics are authoritarian—they deny teachers and students the freedom to chart their own curriculum and take ownership of their learning.

“Shakespeare can’t survive hack teachers, and he can’t survive progressive principles, either,” Bauerlein writes.

Shakespeare endures in the classroom on aesthetic and cultural grounds that progressivism refuses.  It casts aesthetic excellence as a political tool, the imposition of one group’s tastes upon everyone else.  And it marks the culture at whose pinnacle Shakespeare stands (the English literary-historical canon) as an outdated authority.

To say that Shakespeare is central to our cultural inheritance—beloved by audiences in the 19th-century American west, quoted by presidents, source of countless American idioms—is to dispel the multiculturalist breakthrough of the mid-20th century.  If progressivism reigns in secondary and higher education, Shakespeare, Pope, and Wordsworth are doomed.

Yeah, but we’ll still have The Joy Luck Club and The House on Mango Street