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December 11, 2024 - 4:00pm
I am all for diversity. I believe schoolchildren should read books and poetry from different parts of the world. They should learn about the rich and the poor, male and female, the noble and the devious, black and white, African and European: every shade of humanity which can conceivably be given weight within the scope of secondary school English education.
This is because the great works of literature are in conversation with one another. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, can’t be appreciated in isolation: he was greatly influenced by Greek tragedy. Zadie Smith’s fiction owes a debt to Charles Dickens and E.M. Forster. James Baldwin is a literary descendent of the King James Bible. The canon is a family.
But I fear something else is suggested by “diversity” when it is invoked in the context of teaching the English curriculum. Not that of a family, but of warring factions. Consider, for example, the open letter sent last week and signed by a distinguished list of authors including Malorie Blackman and Lee Child, which called for a greater degree of “diversity” in the English syllabus.
The letter asks for “a curriculum that reflects the issues and diversities of our society, ensuring all children and young people are represented”. The problem with this is it misreads the point of literature. It offers shallow criteria by which to judge fiction and poetry. The point of literature is that it represents the experiences of people beyond characteristics such as race and ethnicity, class and sex. It need not directly reflect a niche issue of modern society, but should be judged instead on whether it communicates something meaningful about the human experience over time.
It is possible for a child from an immigrant background, for instance, to feel resonance in William Shakespeare and John Milton: both writers are concerned not with the superficial but the universal. The same is true of Achebe and Baldwin: are we to conclude that these authors have nothing or little to offer to white students?
The letter also suggests that teachers “report an anecdotal connection between students feeling English Literature classes are more relevant to them with improved attendance and punctuality at school”. This comes across as patronising: it implies the classics are not accessible to ethnic-minority students, that there are books for white students and books for non-white students. In fact, books belong to everyone irrespective of their identity.
I believe in diversity if it’s the product of merit, and not when it is something enforced top-down out of a misguided notion of helping ethnic-minority students. The only way to effectively provide such students with the knowledge they can use to thrive in various aspects of life is by grounding them in the canon.
This doesn’t mean they should not read literature by black and brown authors — far from it. It is that these authors should be included on the basis of their literary qualities rather than their race.
The black writer W.E.B. DuBois lived from 1868 to 1963, a century in which African Americans experienced the evils of segregation and lynching. For DuBois, the canon was not something to be resisted but an essential part of his heritage. “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the colour line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls,” he argued. “From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
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SubscribeOf course, “something else is suggested” by the diversity crowd. Usually, it’s a zero-sum game that erases anything from white, Western sources and replaces it with anything that is not white or Western, as if people are incapable of handling both.
In Canada, one library has removed or is removing all titles before 2008: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-library-book-weeding-1.6964332. Because nothing says learn from history quite like pretending that history began yesterday.
That news item from Canada is truly terrifying.
“[T]he Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising.” 1984, Orwell
Also, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera:
‘The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
Well said.
There is reading for entertainment and reading “for knowledge”.
Reading for knowledge is the subject in schools. It shouldn’t always be easy, sometimes challenging, often thoughtful. And quite often need reading two or three times before any of it really sinks in.
With all that is supposed to be happening in teaching English (both language and literature) I do wonder if the primary driver is to make the teachers life easier.
As a corollary to that, might it not be that new English teachers themselves struggle with the universal canon, having been inducted into their professional lives by an academe that’s been pursuing the edicts of “diversity” over universalism?
What hope then, of introducing young minds to the richness of human experience provided by those whose work has stood the test of time, regardless of any factor related to their identity?
Great article. It’s true that because of this hypersensitivity around diversity many British people have little to no knowledge of the cultural treasures left to them by some truly great writers. As stated such knowledge could be a source of unifying people no matter how different their superficial cultures might be.
Great literature is about sharing the human experience and growing wisdom and insights, it has the power to speak to any one no matter their race or ethnicity. When I read great Russian, Japanese, India writers etc I am not constantly made aware of “difference” or “diversity” but struck by the many attitudes, hopes, dreams, triumphs, tragedies, threats and dreads that we share as humans beings.
I’m writing badly but I have to say that this whole “diversity” grift has to end for there to be any hope for our futures – we need to find the things that connect us and stop allowing ourselves to be divided and sub-divided by endless bs.
Thoughtful piece! A major problem is that ‘diversity’ is a much-misused word.
My response to the institutional woke androphobic racism of the literary establishment is only to read books written by White men.
I understand, that is the reaction one could believe this insidious ideology was designed to provoke. Divide and rule.
A well meaning attempt to broaden the scope of what is taught in schools has morphed into an intolerant, censorious orthodoxy.
They removed Larkin and Heaney from the poetry curriculum a year or so back and introduced 20 new poets, none of whom were white or male, in a country that’s 85% white!
And we’re all supposed to stand around applauding.
The worst thing about it all is that my teenage kids know it’s a load of bullshit, and just work the system as best they can.
Sometimes it feels like many people actually can’t identify or empathise with people in a different situation to themselves. So seemingly they can’t read, for example, Pride and Prejudice because it is set in the past and they fail to see the universality of the characters situations, and only see the precise detail.