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A lawsuit targeted a school district and the State of Florida over restricting access to a book about a penguin family with two fathers.
The temptation to chuck out the old is strong, but can only be part of the answer
As someone who writes books, lectures on teacher training courses and spent 15 years teaching English literature, I’m often asked what I think should be included in the literary canon or what should replace the existing canon. It feels like a trick question.
First, a definition might be useful. When we say canon we’re referring to an established selection of works that have been dyed into the fabric of British education. It’s the familiar roll call of names that have featured on the curriculum seemingly for ever, and may well continue to do so. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Orwell, Blake, Priestley, Owen, Larkin … the parade of (largely) dead white men whom successive generations of British students are invited to meet and grapple with on their academic journeys.
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Last month, a school district committee in Utah decided that the Bible should be removed from elementary and middle school libraries.
Cindy Campos reads the book "Stay Safe" to one of her sons in Dallas.
Amanda Gorman reciting a poem during the inauguration.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall declined Scholastic’s offer to license her book, “Love in the Library,” on the condition that she edit her author’s note to remove a description of past and present instances of racism.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has campaigned against what he has described as “woke indoctrination” in the classroom.
The government’s laissez-faire approach has imperilled the whole system. It’s time for a radical rethink
If you listened to ministers, you’d think that there’s a crisis of “wokeness” on campus. Every young person is apparently simultaneously an overvulnerable snowflake terrified of opinions and a yowling fighter in the culture wars. But although there might well be a problem with the diversity and range of ideas in the academy, choosing to focus on it amounts to pointing at a fire in a wastepaper bin while the buildings burn down. The real problems are the result of government abandoning all management of the university world.
There used to be a cap on individual universities’ student numbers. Each of them got a figure imposed from the centre, and each received an appropriate level of funding. So far, so good. Every institution had a certain number of places, and they worked out what A-level offers they could make, based on those numbers, combined with past experience of how students would fare compared to predicted grades. Those universities at the “top” asked for As, in the “middle” Bs, and so on.
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A current first grade history lesson in use in Florida.
My mother, Brenda Almond, who has died aged 85, was a philosopher, author and ethicist.
She was born into a poor, working-class family in Birkenhead, Merseyside. Her father, Edward, a painter and decorator, was called up during the second world war and died soon after; her mother, Margaret (nee Potter), died of a respiratory illness when Brenda, an only child, was five.
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My friend and teacher Kenneth Fowler, who has died aged 88, was an eminent historian of the hundred years war, and a leading light in the teaching of history over more than three decades at Edinburgh University.
Ken’s parents, Ronald and Ethel (nee McMahon), lived next door to the large grocer’s shop they kept at Clayton-le-Woods in Lancashire, and sent Ken and his older brother, David, later a successful businessman, to the local primary school, from where Ken went on to boarding school in Derbyshire.
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Greenwich University is warning students to prepare themselves for the ‘toxic friendships’ Jane Austen satirises in her novel
Spoilers – but does it matter? Now Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is identified by a British university as a vehicle for potentially disturbing “gender stereotypes” and “toxic relationships and friendships”, perhaps the safest way to approach the satire is, if at all, second hand.
The University of Greenwich’s trigger warning (TW) is for undergraduates, but since the original intention of such alerts was to prepare readers for some possible reminder of upsetting experiences, it’s older ones who should be most grateful for this vigilance. Who, after all, is likely to have squeezed in more toxic relationships or suffered more acutely from gender stereotyping? Can such a novel be considered remotely safe for mature women, even those of us too young to have been jilted by an army captain in a Georgian pump room? Plainly, since Greenwich has stuck a warning on it, not.
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