Claims his writing is not “ethnically-diverse” enough.
Via Campus Reform:
A high school English teacher inspired a heated debate over the weekend after writing that she does not want to teach Shakespeare to her students.
“I do not believe that I am ‘cheating’ my students because we do not read Shakespeare,” Dana Dusbiber, who teaches at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento California, wrote in The Washington Post over the weekend.
“I do not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach my students about the human condition.”
The veteran teacher declared that she has a “dislike” of reading Shakespeare because of her own “personal disinterest in reading stories written in an early form of the English language that I cannot always easily navigate,” and because there is “a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.”
The Common Core English Language Arts Standards include Shakespeare as a high school requirement.
Dusbiber wrote that Shakespeare lived in a “pretty small world” and that it “might now be appropriate for us to acknowledge him as chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.”
“What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important,” wrote Dusbiber.
Dusbiber argued that students could learn from other forms of world literature including from African, Latin American, and Southeast Asian.