A growing amount of woke educators are refusing to research the Bard — accusing his classic functions of boosting”misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir.”
A slew of British literature instructors advised the School Library Journal (SLJ) the way they had been ditching the likes of”Hamlet,””Macbeth” and”Romeo and Juliet” to rather”make room for contemporary, diverse, and lively voices”
Teachers also have to”challenge the whiteness” of this premise that Shakespeare’s works are”universal,” insisted Jeffrey Austin, who’s head of a Michigan high school’s English literature division.
Former Washington state public school instructor Claire Bruncke told SLJ she banished the Bard from her classroom to”ramble from centering the story of snowy, cisgender, heterosexual guys.”
“Removing Shakespeare was a measure I could readily choose to work toward that. And it was rewarding for my pupils,” she insisted.
Other educators said they had been sticking together with Shakespeare, but reframing his functions via a contemporary lens.
Sarah Mulhern Gross, an British teacher in High Technology High School in Lincroft, NJ, said that she had been instructing”Romeo and Juliet””with a negative of poisonous masculinity analysis.”
Within her SLJ post,”To Teach or Not To Teach,” librarian Amanda MacGregor recognized the Bard as a”genius wordsmith” accountable for”masterful wordplay, creative use of speech, biting wit, puns, and characters that were innovative.”
