Eliminating Shakespeare to make room  for Lady Gaga and Zulu poetry
Eliminating Shakespeare to make room for Lady Gaga and Zulu poetry

Western culture seems to have become like poisonous hemlock. The new watchword is “decolonize”. Multiculturalism, with its hatred for “the white man, male, European, dead, and an Afrocentrism resembling the Eurocentrism of the past, has transformed Western culture into a symbol of a civilization destined to disappear, sick and shameful at the same time, rich ad nauseam, imperialist, domineering, polluting, alien to its own children. Hence the idea of ​​imposing an ideological quarantine on Western culture. And this leftist political correctness is encouraging the Islamic extremists to raise the stakes to win the cultural war they are advancing.

South Africa, says The Times of London, is preparing to eliminate the study of William Shakespeare from the school curriculum. Education Minister Angie Motshekga will replace the Bard with African poets. “The consideration of the works of Shakespeare is one aspect of the overall process of review of the literature,” said Motshekga in response to a parliamentary question. Vast program.

France has removed great Christian figures, such as Charlemagne, from schools, to replace them, for instance, with studying the history of Mali and other African kingdoms.

The “decolonization” of Western culture was born in London. The union of students of SOAS, the prestigious School of Oriental Studies of the British capital, recently asked to remove from the curriculum Plato, Kant, Descartes, Hegel and other pillars of Western culture, since they are all white, and exemplars of colonialism who should be immediately expelled from the West's academic institutions. 

Only 4 of the 52 leading universities of America continue to offer Shakespeare in the curriculum.
Last May, two philosophers wrote an editorial for the New York Times espousing the idea. At the University of Yale, the student body has launched a petition to ask the department to “decolonize Literature” by eliminating Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. So Alexander Pope falls and Stefani Germanotta, alias Lady Gaga, rises - and is now the subject of academic courses.

Stanford University rejected the demand by a student group to maintain the “Western culture” course. In 1970, 10 of the 50 most important American colleges had a compulsory course of “Western civilization” while 31 of them offered the course to the students if they chose it. Today, according to a report titled “The Vanishing West” by the National Association of Teachers, no American university offers similar courses anymore.

Only 4 of the 52 leading universities of America continue to offer Shakespeare in the curriculum.

In England, the University of Oxford announced that it has begun a “review” of its curricula to include more “diversity”. It means reducing or eliminating masterpieces such as the “Canterbury Tales”, so white and so Christian, to make room for the Zulu poetry. “Was Shakespeare racist?”, asks an article in the website of the Oxford editions by Gary Taylor, editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare, which publishes the complete works of the Bard.

As Pascal Bruckner has written, “a zest of zen, two pinches of Taoism, a slice of Inca, a little of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, two tablespoons of Tanzanian socialism, a nice cup of Chinese cultural revolution, a slice of Iranian Shiism, boil slowly, and the potion of magic salvation is ready”.

Is it more flavorful than the "stale" Western canon?