Educational Earthquake: ‘Disappearing’ the Great Writers From Schools

[Weatherman2020]

It is hard to overstate the alarming implications of this educational earthquake. Deliberately withholding Shakespeare from young minds is a form of aesthetic starvation, but depriving them of Orwell is a moral crime. It is from Orwell’s “Animal Farm” that young minds first grasp the nature of totalitarian evil, whether it arises from the left or the right, and understand the preciousness of their freedoms.

Evil arising from the right today, such as the neo-Nazi movement, is instantly recognizable and universally deplored. But the collapse of the Soviet Union did not shame left-wing intellectuals into embarrassment for their ideology. The utopian dream of human perfectability and equality of outcome under an all-powerful state persists and grows in the West. Today, on the 70thanniversary of its 1949 publication, Orwell’s novel “1984,” which exposes the inherent perils of Marxist ideology, is as worthy of study as it was at the height of the Cold War.

“1984” was not meant as prophecy, but as warning. “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive,” Orwell said, “but that something resembling it could arrive.” Has “something resembling it” arrived in the West? Is progressivism that “something”?

Educational Earthquake: ‘Disappearing’ the Great Writers From Schools

Gee, what other political group was burning books in the 1930’s?

 

[Dekster]

It is Canada so not surprising.

 

[Oddball]

And they called those who decried the removal of such classics and Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin from schools as alarmists.

 

[mosser]

What's worse is even when students are encouraged to read important works, they are asked to read sloppy summaries of them. These summaries are tailor-made for the student who wants to read to ace exams, not for students who read for the love of reading. I was wondering what the new high school canon might be? Is there place in the canon for writers such as DF Wallace or Pynchon in perhaps fifty years' time? I doubt it.
True what you say about the left. The left may be more attuned to issues of social justice, but it is stubborn about the effectiveness of due process and constitutional change. As sociologists have shown, the left and the right share this unsettling similarity. If the right rejects change to protect heritage and tradition, the left rejects it to safeguard the sanctity of the Constitution and the Parliament, ultimately oppressing those they want to liberate.