Futurity recently published an article by Angie Hunt called “The case for teaching students to question ‘classic literature'” which discusses research by Jeanne Dyches into the way literature is selected and taught in high school classrooms.

Dyches’ research involved asking a high school literature class to “[review] more than a century’s worth of national studies on the titles most commonly taught, national and local standards for recommended readings, as well as local and state curriculum policies.” Her “findings” include an increase in the students’ awareness of the politicized nature of the titles selected for inclusion in literature curriculum.

I deliberately surrounded the word findings in quotation marks, as it’s highly doubtful students reached this “awareness” on their own, given that Dyches was actually leading (teaching) the class herself, and thus destroying any objective foundation for her research. It’s difficult to see how students couldn’t be manipulated by Dyches’ own bias in that situation.

Nonetheless, her paper and the article Futurity published discussing it provide ample evidence of a serious problem in the way literature and history have been taught in the US since the mid-1960s: the surplanting of fact-based, logic-oriented, whole-picture learning with an emotional, “through the student’s experience” style of learning.

The primary example of this is in Dyches’ insistence that teachers remove objective, rational assessments of literature and replace them with rewriting the stories from “diverse” perspectives. For example, “students rewrote Romeo and Juliet to address race by making Romeo and Juliet an interracial couple.”

It’s not a bad exercise, truly. In fact, it probably led to a deeper understanding of the story itself, since the only way it could be rewritten was to read and understand it.

However, that contribution to students’ understanding of the story doesn’t detract from the shallow, easy fix Dyches’ methods suggest. Merely substituting different ethnicities for the lead characters does not make them easier to identify with. I’ll come back to that point in a moment, and why Dyches’ approach is so problematic.

First, though, let me address Dyches’ own ignorance of the deeper issues surrounding the way we teach literature.

Dyches’ main agenda foments a perspective that ignores the historical context surrounding these stories and what that can teach students. Instead, she seeks to transport the stories to the modern world without any historical context whatsoever, thus demolishing two of the most important lessons students can learn from classic literature: the study of the society in which these works were released and the comparison of historical societies with our own.

Furthermore, by defining classic literature almost solely as works written by white European men, she’s ignoring the rich field of historic literature written by women, as well as newly discovered or introduced classics written by non-white, non-European, or non-male individuals. It’s a deliberately misleading perspective, one designed to draw the eye away from the truly diverse tradition of classic literature so as to highlight the victim mentality Dyches and other progressives press on modern society in the form of intersectionality and identity politics.

I’m not arguing for the exclusive teaching of classic literature, and especially literature drawn specifically from the Western tradition, in the classroom. Many other works are perfectly valid fodder for reading and discussion. My editor’s cousin, whom he mentors, studied The Outsiders and The Hunger Games back-to-back last year in her eighth grade literature class. Both were excellent choices. Each is important in its own right. Neither was written by a man.

To be frank, I would’ve been just as happy if the teacher had chosen, for example, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (a personal favorite from my own childhood), Night by Elie Wiesel, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Kindred by Octavia Butler (also available as a graphic novel), or anything by Kahlil Gibran.

Likewise, classic stories are entering our collective awareness every day. This list of modern classics compiled by Book Riot, for example, contains plenty of truly diverse authors and stories. One of the books on that list is To Kill a Mockingbird. That novel alone offers opportunities for a much more honest discussion of racism than any rewriting of a classic story ever could, and it does so by placing the story firmly within its appropriate historical context.

And look! It’s even offered as a teen-friendly graphic novel.

In the world of academia, too much emphasis is placed on “resistance” to the “patriarchy” in the form of rewriting or erasing classic, Western culture and its teachings, and not enough emphasis is placed on actually understanding our shared cultural heritage, which is drawn from far more than works created by white European men.

This deliberate shift is at best misguided and at worst an intentional attempt to destroy traditional Western culture, all in the name of a social justice movement that leaves little room for actual justice, or individual freedom and identity, for that matter. The political left’s deemphasis on teaching history as a series of facts, and an insistence on framing all history around white colonialism and racism to the exclusion of any other lens, has led to the under-thirty-five set having zero concept of their own cultural heritage. It is, in fact, this insistence that has taught young people to judge any other based solely on their own narrow concept of identity, rather than through an empathetic understanding of humanity as a whole.

In other words, intersectionality (identity politics) is encouraging the very things it seeks to redress, namely racism, misogyny, and hatred, and destroying the understanding and support intersectionality advocates so desperately crave.

If we want our young people to grow and learn, then the first thing they must do is understand what came before them. They must understand their full connection to the past, which goes far, far beyond white colonialism and racism, both of which are tiny microcosms of influence compared to the abundently rich world history in which every human should be immersed.

We could continue to teach them to interpret the world solely through their own eyes (or worse, their feelings), as Dyches and other progressives insist, but what will that do except mire students even more deeply in self-centered ignorance?

And trust me, this is exactly what is happening. According to Hunt, Dyches says that we are “assigning these texts without questioning issues of race or gender [which] may exclude students who do not see themselves in the text, and make them feel their voices are not valued.”

But if students don’t see themselves in these texts, whatever texts are assigned, it’s because we’re emphasizing the wrong aspects of characters and stories, namely the outward appearances and experiences of the characters, rather than emphasizing their universal humanity. The former isolates students from their broader communities; it sets them apart and pigeonholes them into tightly defined definitions of themselves from which they can never escape, let alone understand others. The latter helps students develop empathy toward other individuals regardless of their race, color, creed, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.

Which is a better mindset to encourage in students, the xenophobia of intersectionality, or the sense of belonging to something bigger than one’s self that is an intrinsic part of the Western, classic liberal tradition?

Classic literature, old and new, is an excellent remedy to today’s myopia, if it is well taught, but the proper teaching of literature is not through the erasure, shaming, or deliberate misunderstanding of its historical context, or by ignoring that context in favor of rewriting stories from “diverse” (i.e. proper progressive groupthink) perspectives. Only by asking students to seek and deeply study such context, without judgment or prejudice, can they truly understand classic literature enough to question the culture in which it was produced.