While the House managers were quoting Shakespeare in their case against President Donald Trump last week, it appears that the Bard may soon be less known than “Poor Yorick” who we once knew so well. There is a growing campaign by teachers to drop Shakespeare and other Western literature from classes. One group, #DisruptTexts, insists “This is about White supremacy and colonization.” Lorena German, National Council of Teachers of English Anti-Racism Committee chair and a co-founder of the Disrupt Texts forum, insisted “everything about the fact that he was a man of his time is problematic about his plays. We cannot teach Shakespeare responsibly and not disrupt the ways people are characterized and developed.”
We previously discussed how the portrait of William Shakespeare was removed at the University of Pennsylvania’s English Department as a statement for greater racial sensitivity and diversity. Students are increasingly being deprived of such foundational classics as “Romeo and Juliet,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear” or Richard III. These are works that are not only masterpieces but shaped generations of later works and continue to be referenced in modern writing. Yet, this is a movement that has been building since 1987 when Jesse Jackson led Stanford undergraduates chanting, “Hey, ho, Western Civ has got to go!”
Amanda McGregor, a Minnesota-based librarian wrote in the January issue of School library journal that “Shakespeare’s work is full of problematic and outdated ideas, lots of misogyny, racism, homophobia, class discrimination, anti-Semitism, misogyny”
German insisted that Shakespeare “is not ‘universal’ in a way that other authors are not. He is not more ‘timeless’ than anyone else.” Some teachers advocating replacing Shakespeare with such works as “Hunger Games.”
Shakespeare could have seen his coming when he wrote in As You Like It that “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” However, the exiting of Shakespeare will come at a terrible cost for our students. While Shakespeare appears the new rallying cry for woke teachers, he is “a man more sinned against than sinning.” If he is stripped away from our reading lists, our students will be the poorer for it.
EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING is racist to liberals. Liberals actually accused a hurricane of being racist when it swerved off course and damaged a low income neighborhood instead of staying on it’s predicted path which would of had it damage a higher income neighborhood .
They called a freaking chipmunk racist, ( A RODENT for God’s sakes ) !!!!! when a story came out with video footage showing a chipmunk building his home under the right side of somebody’s house instead of the chipmunk choosing to construct his home under the left side of the persons house, no joke !!!
Well, considering that the common core ELA standards specifically state that students must read at least one Shakespearean play in 9th/10th grade, and then another one for 11th/12th grade, does this mean we can cancel common core?
RACISM WAS A COMPLETE NON ISSUE UNTIL OBAMA .
Dumb when Reagan said it. Even dumber now.
Lorena German isn’t of European decent, as her name might imply. Her ancestors created nothing but mud huts, and their tools were sharpened sticks. She doesn’t get a say.
I kept my comments short as to not overly confuse the illiterates. Right. Natochka Committee. First find your dictiona ;… ahhh forget it.
This teacher deserves a T-Shirt with one of Shakespeare’s shortest truths. ‘Women’s Best Dress, Undress. No need to get angry it refers to a T Shirt. and the words refer to the school teacher wondering ‘which of these openings is for the left arm. I do not want to be shunned for being right.
What the teacher really meant but didn’t want to write for public consumption. I am too stupid to do anything else and could only get a degree in teaching or sociology. Sociology is so looked down on with good reason but the problem with teaching in is I never learned to do anything that needs teaching. Even English is hard so I had someone write this for me. Now the problem is I don’t know anything so how can I teach? Idea! Become an instructor of nothing? Works for me. Better yet trash anything even though I know nothing about it.
Sincerely, Teacher without a Clue.
Notice: I wrote this to help out those who never going to understand the Universal Empty Field Theory and legs are not long enough to do Barb for imitations.
It’s away of explaining the inexplicable.
Of course Turley puts out things like this to his obedient Trumpian troglodyte’s but says nothing on how State republican officials are censuring their own federal elected officials. There is no lower form of canceling than censuring people for what they voted on or said. It looks like republicans are using cancel culture on their own.
Sociology Major? Or Teacher?
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
creeps in this petty pace from day to day
and all our yesterdays have lit the paths of fools to thier dusty death
Egads! What light through yonder window breaks?
By Jove.
Clad in masks of blue and hair of kendal green something wicked this way cometh.
By all the stars.
They are liketh satan as thy to thy self
How ignoble in reason
How like an ape in apprehension
It is the democrat
let’s read this poetry selection from the great English writer Rudyard Kipling, from a larger work “A Diversity of Creatures”
read it out loud and see if it pleases you! Classroom discussion: “can hate ever be good?”
Sal
“The Beginnings
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate.
They were not easily moved,
They were icy-willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the English began to hate.
Their voices were even and low,
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show,
When the English began to hate.
It was not preached to the crowd,
It was not taught by the State.
No man spoke it aloud,
When the English began to hate.
It was not suddenly bred,
It will not swiftly abate,
Through the chill years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the English began to hate.”
Supremacy, like affirmative action, quotas, etc., may and shall not be legislated under the U.S. Constitution.
Inferiority may and shall not be legislated against.
The U.S. Constitution has and does not play favorites.
Supremacy must be achieved in freedom and the free markets of the private sector.
Supremacy, may the best man win…oops, that’s redundant, isn’t it – best man – winner?
My bad…and nature, God and the Constitution’s way.
There is Yellow Supremacy is China.
Oh, and, there is no illegal or, otherwise, mass invasion/mass immigration.
The liberals in China are not allowed to abuse Chinese immigration policy and import massive numbers of new non-yellow liberal voters to dilute the native population into extinction and in order that liberal leaders
obtain more and evermore personal power for personal power’s sake at the expense of the national identity.
Oh, and, to be candid, the enslaved population under Chinese communism is not actually allowed to vote – the Chinese vote like Americans in the corrupted American one-party communist state, in abject futility.
The CCP is certainly not about “yellow supremacy.,”
The CCP is for the CHINESE ie the Han people. The lesser ethnic minorities of the PRC will submit to Chinese CP leadership, or else
At least in the PRC the ethnic majority– the Han Chinese people– do not have to worry about their government downgrading and oppressing them for being Chinese.
Maybe they will oppress them for a hundred other reasons, but not that.
Maybe they trampled all over Chinese culture during the red insanity of the Cultural Revolution, but that has been firmly cancelled by the leadership since the Army sent its angry generals on up to Mao with an offer he could not refuse, to end it, or else. 45 years hence, the CCP actually supports Chinese culture and the “four olds’ that it once attacked with insanely fevered imagination.
In America, which is our concern, the question is, when will our government stop trying to oppress the majority population, to dilute it, to degrade and disempower it, to erase and destroy our ancestral culture, and finally cancel the Red Guard on the Long March through American institutions?
Well, don’t hold your breath
Saloth Sar
Yep, you’re right. There is no communist enslavement, oppression, tyranny, re-education camps, crackdowns on freedom, no 10K killed in Tienanmen Square, systemic rape, “re-education” camps, mass arrests in Hong Kong, etc. People are politically “happy” in China or they are “disappeared,” right?
I did not make any of those claims which you just stated. You either didn’t read it or you don’t understand. I’ll repeat what you obviously missed:
“the Han Chinese people– do not have to worry about their government downgrading and oppressing them for being Chinese. Maybe they will oppress them for a hundred other reasons, but not that.”
But don’t feel lonely. You are in good company in not understanding the CCP or its relevance to China as a nation in history.
I seem to have a hard time conveying this notion. You are not the first to miss the point. Often I am too obtuse. So let me sum it up succinctly. Ready?
The CCP are nationalists.
Sal.
We’re not parsing the nuances of the burgeoning Asian hordes –
although pollution/anthropogenic climate change exists, not due to “emissions” but because of rampant, egregious, malicious overpopulation in Asia, Southeast Asia and the Subcontinent.
We’re exposing the horrors of the brutal tyranny and oppression of communism and psychotic totalitarian lunatics who oppose freedom.
The CCP may oppress the PRC but you are not in the PRC. The CCP is not oppressing you. They may have bribed Joe Biden’s family but can you fault them for pursuing their own national interests by corrupting the corruptible. Realistically, they have little sway over the Democrats as evidenced by their weak stunts like sending a honeypot to seduce Smallwell. This was not impressive. No, the pull they have here, is due to them offering big labor markets for production of the stuff that the billionaires are selling. The billionaires want to use that slave labor the CCP controls, but it’s these Western billionaires that have the real pull here, not the CCP.
You other comments make little sense. You talk about oppression of communism out of one side of your mouth and then complain about Asian overpopulation out of the other side. Did you forget the one child policy? If the KMT had won the Chinese Civil war then there would probably be 2 billion Chinese now instead of one.
I should like some of my conservative friends to quit demonizing the CCP when they should reserve their ire for those who are here resident in North America who actually are calling the shots.
If I am asked who is a bigger adversary, Xi Jinpeng, or the group of the Western living, white-skinned billionaire oligarchs. For my money, it aint Xi. Even if they are in league together, understand, Xi has not direct power over us. It’s our own opressors who need the attention. Quite whining about the CCP it’s a waste of breath. I tuned out Steve Bannon on this incessant and non-productive them over a year ago.
Don’t worry about the so-called Asian hordes. They’re not the ones who are going to raise your taxes, take your guns, open your borders, and take Shakespeare off the curriculum. Wake up
Sal Sar
PS while we’re at it, did you hear that the American NIH was funding the gain of function virus research in Wuhan? Right. That’s my point. Don’t worry so much about the Chicoms over there, worry about your own kind busting your bllz over here
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6232251393001#sp=show-clips
Good points, here. It’s the American oligarchs we need to worry about most. (Is George Soros American? Is Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Mr. Twitter aka Howard Hughes .. Bill Gates?) These guys buy and sell our leaders and our elections. They couldn’t quite get Trump until Covid and the media blackouts, the mail-in ballot workarounds, and the hundreds of thousands poured in to swing state cities to pay the election counters, the drop box van haulers, etc.
There is Yellow Supremacy is China.
Oh, and, there is no illegal or, otherwise, mass invasion/mass immigration.
The liberals in China are not allowed to abuse Chinese immigration policy and import massive numbers of new non-yellow liberal voters to dilute the native population into extinction and in order
that liberal leaders obtain more and evermore personal power for personal power’s sake at the expense of the national identity.
Oh, and, to be candid, the enslaved population under Chinese communism is not actually allowed to vote – the Chinese vote like Americans in the corrupted American one-party communist
state, in abject futility.
Just say you hate asians dude. Stop dancing around it.
It is an oversimplification to call the CCP nationalists. They are tyrants, and hold absolute power over others. Yes, the Han have most of the top CCP power jobs and goodies, but the “some pigs are better than others” strategy prevails.
I think that if we survive in 50 years, and history is yet written by people instead of machines, it will be entirely obvious that the CCP was a fundamentally national-socialist regime.
in my mind it’s clear enough already. They are socialists, and they are nationalists. They are also very, very much a Han Chinese gang and the lesser minorities of China have little representation at the top. This is not to say that they have not promoted reliable minority cadres into leadership positions. They understand as do our economic elites the usefulness of “affirmative action” in mitigating the obvious.
This article takes a very close look at the subject. It is a few years old and perhaps not entirely consistent with my own belief, but I know of none better.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/summer_china_li.pdf
I am not condemning the CCP for being ethnocentric towards the Han majority. I do not really find that troubling. I have no problem with ethnocentrism playing a role in politics.
My initial point was that it is hard to understand how being antagonistic towards the majority population has worked so well for American economic and political elites.
Sal
in china if you act white they call you a banana. yellow on the outside white on the inside.
in china they have a word for idiotic liberals who wear the white skin and are always prattling about white racism. it is: baizuo
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/curious-rise-of-white-left-as-chinese-internet-insult/
You stop right now! There is no prejudice or racism anywhere else in the universe. The only offering of that anywhere is that of the white crackers in America. And to prove it, we want all the white man’s money, right now. Oh and we want his culture, his jobs, his educations, his stocks, his bonds, his houses, his women, his national government, his treasury, his mint, his dollar printing machines and his country…by noon tomorrow! Just what the —- do da white man think he’s doin’ in his country anyway? Oh yeah, I forgot, we demand da white man leave his, uh, our country, right now, too.
The average yearly income in Sub Saharan Africa is about $800 per annum. I will not leave here for that thank you. Perhaps a swap all the lovely brown people in the UK for a bunch of crackers ?
In Washington DC these days it’s Red on the outside and Red on the inside
People must adapt to the outcomes of freedom.
Freedom does not adapt to people,
Dictatorship does.
To the Anglo-Saxon peoples of the Earth, your ancestors were, where you are before. Do you wish to exist, or not? Existence is never easy. Sal.
I WOKE this morning! This statement previously was an acknowledgement of arising from sleep, but today it foretells of a sleepy mind full of mush. Those in the Woke movement know nothing; of a Great Society, of learned individuals, of logic, of successful Governments, of Science, and on and on in their failure to comprehend anything beyond their rigid belief system. The Woke’rs (pun intended) think that 2 + 2 = 4 is racist, that the XY chromosome can become a XX chromosome, that reading masters of language will corrupt a mind, that a child has superior knowledge about earth’s climate, to continue this list would be way to lengthy for this blog. I see the Woke and Cancel Culture movements leading the United States off the deep end into a Tyrannical Government.
George, what are your thoughts about combatting this menacing movement? I say “menacing” because it seems to me that the word “menacing” aptly describes the approach used.
Cassidy, this movement started when I was a young man. When I returned from Viet Nam I was assaulted by many for serving in the military, and thought the assaulters know not from where they come. I shrugged them off and went about my daily life. They did not; they started getting into the educational system, teachers, professors, school boards, and then elected offices local, state and federal. Always preaching their liberal and socialist views to the young minds they were now teaching. It took many years to form cohesion across America. All the while I and many like me thought it is so far out there, NOT TO WORRY, there is no way the majority of Americans will ever believe is this Claptrap. But here we are with fools leading the way. I have no idea how to rid this plaque in the short order except to talk to the young (as I do) and try and educate them of the dire path we are entering. I leave, quoting two brilliant minds thoughts on destiny “But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men-in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy” Albert Einstein; “Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today”, Friedrich Nietzsche.
You were in Vietnam but you misunderstood the lesson of the victors it seems. Uncle Ho had a plan to do more than talk.
What you mean the liberals in DC, the Four Stars who knew how not to win?
As Puck tells Oberon in Midsummers Night Dream: “What fools these mortals be . . .”
But as the old jabs puts it, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”
–G.B. Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists” in. Man and Superman
“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Like most sayings, this is only half true. Those who can, teach; those who can’t — the bitter, the misguided, the failures from other fields — find in the school system an excuse or a refuge. –Bel Kaufman, Up the Down Staircase
The teacher’s profession has not covered itself with much glory lately. The unionized teachers in fact have done all they can to avoid teaching anyone while still getting the salary and keeping the kids out of the class rooms as long as possible. Of course there still are good and caring teachers, just not enough.
But, gentle reader please consider what Puck tells us about the importance of William Shakespeare’s plays in the epilog to Midsummers Night Dream:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended.
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I’m an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call:
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends
Here is a link to this moment. Link:
But in the prologue to Henry V, listen to Derek Jacoby tell us Shakespeare’s business then and now:
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5dI65LvbrE
O, for a muse of fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,
Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and
fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O pardon, since a crookèd figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high uprearèd and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth,
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our
kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning th’ accomplishment of many years
Into an hourglass; for the which supply,
Admit me chorus to this history,
Who, prologue-like, your humble patience pray
Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.
And now a word about fun, laughter, revelry and good times
Happy Mardi Gras.
Laissez les bons temps roule
I guess the fasting started early in 2021 huh?
Sal
Fasting starts Ash Wednesday. Join me.
I’m giving up reading the news and all things politics for Lent so you will have to post as “Estovir” in lieu of me on this forum to keep Peter Shill the paraschiz he is
😜
Amanda McGregor, a Minnesota-based librarian
The education and guild ideology of librarians is another scandal.
Here’s a hypothesis: what Thos. Sowell said a generation ago applies. A great many school teachers were themselves mediocre students and identify with mediocre students. They’re stewed through teacher-training programs which act to reduce the quality of the teacher pool as people with no patience for nonsense leave the program and elect to do something else with their lives. Teachers often have weak background in subject knowledge and they have to report to administrators who were themselves inept teachers and are among those most likely to believe the guild ideology of the teachers colleges. The mediocrity is tarted up as ‘anti-racism’.
true but not sufficient explanation. it is not mediocrity that impels it, it is the wicked and cunning excellence of the culture destroying globalist financiers who are deliberately and intentionally ruining our nation, which employs these mediocrities to lethal effect
Sal
I don’t think Goldman Sachs is responsible for this.
To deny history ignores the path for understanding what we are today. Ignorance seems to have no limits.
From Jesse Jackson to Lorena German … it is FOOLS who babble this nonsense. They and FOOLS like them cannot rewrite history or literature. We know Jackson “preached” his own brand of racism; some psychiatrist can opine about what hateful, uncivil evil drives German. (That is “news” to me about Penn taking down a portrait of Shakespeare. But not surprising! If these FOOLS have their way, the Penn’s so-called “English” department can return the portrait because no one will recognize him.)
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” More appropriate in this case, ” It is a tale told by an idiot”. Shakespeare transcends ignorance.