The idea that study of school subjects needs to fulfill some sort of other purpose, usually either related to social justice or employment, seem to be completely ubiquitous now. Even school for the very young, as well as story books written for them, are see in that light.
Educators don’t seem to be able to appreciate things like literature or knowledge for its own sake.

Take the words of Sun Tzu: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Then I would say that even a non-westerner determined to defeat colonialism and imperialism and white oppression would want to master the western canon from A to Z before the first battle.
Of course, the danger is that she might fall in love with Wagner and Nietzsche and George Eliot and abandon the whole project.

Fabulous, thoughtful and highly therapeutic in this insane world.

If black British people are indeed British – as I consider them to be – then they should learn about the British cultural heritage at school. If a black kid wants to write an essay about e.g. a prominent Nigerian poet writing sonnets in English, fair enough. But booting out Larkin and Heaney, and indeed the whole decolonisation initiative, smacks of a sort of Maoism du bureau, an elite for some inexplicable reason bent on wholesale cultural deracination. What has got into these people?

What a brilliant piece. We come to Un Herd for sanity like this.

A lovely essay. We really need to eliminate this poisonous culture of (largely) manufactured victimhood which seems to pervade the educational system at the moment.  If we fail to do so, then I fear that things will not end well for anyone. I hope sane voices such as Mr Owolade’s prevail.

Those who develop an appetite for literature will continue to read and possibly discover Larkin on their own. For the rest it matters little which literature they forget.

Google Meet tells me he is very upset at being described as fat and ugly.

Beautifully said, well argued. I would like to carry this in my back pocket for when I encounter decolonizers in my school division.

Fantastic! I wish I had your eloquence when I had to attend a ‘ decolonising the curriculum’ meeting with a ‘professor of race’.

Thank you for this piece, your love of the art of writing and to beg for a more transcendent view of humanity is much needed…

Yes, but it is much simpler than all that. The dancing and acrobatics are not necessary. The parsing, the balancing, the ‘see, I read this too’ stuff that seeks to balance what is indeed the fundamental truth (herein a bit obscured) with the ‘progressive’ assertions that the demographics of the poet/author make his or her work somehow worthy — all that is pointless.
Rather let us shout it from the rooftops: “the transcendent beauty of great art” is IT. It is all that matters…yesterday, today, tomorrow. Quality trumps everything. Genius outshines the average, the middling, the ‘not too bad’, the ‘pretty good’. It transcends! That is why, age after age, generation after generation we read it, ponder it, respond to it, are moved by it: life changing in its brilliance. What other reasons could we possibly need to place a work atop the curriculum?
And that is why we read Shakespeare & Yeats & Larkin & Donne & Eliot & Shelley & Keats & Milton & Hopkins. It’s why we read Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Bronte, Austen, Steinbeck, and on. And if you have a writer, a poet, an artist that you believe stands in those same ranks, speak-up! Make a case! Show us the work; let its excellence dazzle! But let us not begin that effort by telling us, first, a skin color or an accent or whether or not the individual in question has ovaries. Equally let us not put forth an argument based on hair color or weight or shoe size or appetite. These things are meaningless.
They are as meaningless, in fact, as the fatally flawed elevation of Diversity as some sort of magic qualifier. We must be ‘diverse’…we must celebrate ‘diversity’ — meaning, of course, not diversity at all but some pasted together amalgam of skin color, genital configuration, and sexual preference….as though that simplistic collage of demographic qualities is somehow blessed.
We need more poetry created by Fat Redheads! We need more novels written by the Freckled who have Large Feet!
It’s hard to imagine anything more ridiculous.
And the Bureau of We Know Best What’s Best for You has decreed: Quality is not Progressive, ‘out, out, darned Quality!’
Leaving us to envision that when those Bureau’d Betters someday find themselves in a Cardiac Center, awaiting potentially life-saving surgery… that the nurse enters to tell them, “Good news, Madame OCR, your cardiac team today is comprised of a very Large White Guy, Two Hispanic Lesbians, 2 Indigenous Peoples, and three more Black Social Justice Majors, one of whom is bisexual. It is indeed the Most Diverse Team we’ve ever assembled!
I’m guessing they’d be overjoyed!

This essay would be good if it wasn’t responding to a caricatured version of the decolonisation movement. Unlike what Owolade alleges, ‘decolonisation’ is not about force feeding social justice content into disciplinary curricula (incidentally, though, that is what the extreme right and the current Tory government’s culture war advocates would have us think). It is about foregrounding the ways in which the fundamental frameworks and categories of thought in social science and humanities subjects are warped in colonial legacies; and introducing students to modes of analysis and works of art that do not reflect this legacy. To be fair, if the only reason a non-white male author is introduced into the English literature curriculum is that their work touches on social/racial justice themes, then yes, I agree with Owolade that this is not a proper way of doing ‘decolonisation’. Rather, the aim should be to expose students to different, non-western approaches to literature, poetry and literary analysis, and in so doing broaden their disciplinary borders. Is there no merit in broadening how we understand a poem, a novella, or a literary genre? Should we not understand how colonial assumptions seeped into the way that we understand what constitutes a great work of literature?