You Are What You Read

For John, BLUF:  There are quite a few places in the world, and a few in the US were culture dies not provide a glue to hold the people together, where trust is low and subgroups protect themselves by intimidation and violence.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

Educational Earthquake:  ‘Disappearing’ the Great Writers From Schools

Here is the sub-headline:

Orwell’s warning in ‘1984’ is as relevant today as during the Cold War

From The Epoch Times, by Ms Barbara Kay, 18 November 2019.

Here is the lede plus two:

The Greater Essex County District School Board in the Windsor, Ont., area is supplanting its grade 11 literature curriculum, which up to now has featured great writers of the western canon such as Shakespeare and George Orwell, with a year-long program of Indigenous writers.  The change has already been effected in eight of the district’s 15 schools.

In the Peel district as well, I am informed by a reader, the same transformation is in progress.  It would be naïve to assume that these schools will remain anomalies for long.  The “disappearing” of dead white European male writers, however magnificent their achievements, may well be normalized across Canada before long.

It is hard to overstate the alarming implications of this educational earthquake.  Deliberately withholding Shakespeare from young minds is a form of aesthetic starvation, but depriving them of Orwell is a moral crime.  It is from Orwell’s “Animal Farm” that young minds first grasp the nature of totalitarian evil, whether it arises from the left or the right, and understand the preciousness of their freedoms.

It is Canada, but it could be us.

This is very scary.  We have built a functioning culture on this Western Canon.  If we stop teaching the Canon, will the culture survive?  If not, what replaces it?  Do we become like Malmo?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff