Yes, of course.
I think Dana Dusbiber's a dummy, and I was delighted several days ago to read this reader comment by "streiff" at
Red State:
One of the bywords of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s when it his college campuses was “relevance.” Students, it was claimed, had the ability to decide what was “relevant” to them and to disregard the rest. What it boiled down to was two generations of history majors who never had to memorize dates and English majors who were never required to learn grammar. Now we see this effect in high school classrooms where teachers are deciding, based on skin color, what material their students should learn and what is too difficult to master.
Once one gets past the utter racism of this point of view and the condescension that says history-began-about-the-time-I-started-high-school — and slack-jawed wonder at the thought a very white-bread, progressive teacher teaching “oral tradition out of Africa” apparently without a text, because oral tradition — we see a nihilism, a Jacobinism, so familiar in the cultural left since Robespierre and his cronies jettisoned the calendar and converted churches into “temples of reason.” We are witnessing a belief that nothing that happened at any point in the past is relevant or useful and that personal testimony is more powerful than millenia of collective human experience.
While Ms. Dusbiber is patting herself on the back at her wisdom in deciding that race makes literature relevant, she is also hamstringing every one of her students by sending them into the world with the view that nothing is significant but their own experiences. They will dumber and, in the long run, poorer for having sat in her classroom.
English teacher: why study Shakespeare? He's a dead white guy | RedState