December 11, 2024 - 4:00pm
I am all for diversity. I believe schoolchildren should read books and poetry from different parts of the world. They should learn about the rich and the poor, male and female, the noble and the devious, black and white, African and European: every shade of humanity which can conceivably be given weight within the scope of secondary school English education.
This is because the great works of literature are in conversation with one another. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, can’t be appreciated in isolation: he was greatly influenced by Greek tragedy. Zadie Smith’s fiction owes a debt to Charles Dickens and E.M. Forster. James Baldwin is a literary descendent of the King James Bible. The canon is a family.
But I fear something else is suggested by “diversity” when it is invoked in the context of teaching the English curriculum. Not that of a family, but of warring factions. Consider, for example, the open letter sent last week and signed by a distinguished list of authors including Malorie Blackman and Lee Child, which called for a greater degree of “diversity” in the English syllabus.
The letter asks for “a curriculum that reflects the issues and diversities of our society, ensuring all children and young people are represented”. The problem with this is it misreads the point of literature. It offers shallow criteria by which to judge fiction and poetry. The point of literature is that it represents the experiences of people beyond characteristics such as race and ethnicity, class and sex. It need not directly reflect a niche issue of modern society, but should be judged instead on whether it communicates something meaningful about the human experience over time.
It is possible for a child from an immigrant background, for instance, to feel resonance in William Shakespeare and John Milton: both writers are concerned not with the superficial but the universal. The same is true of Achebe and Baldwin: are we to conclude that these authors have nothing or little to offer to white students?
The letter also suggests that teachers “report an anecdotal connection between students feeling English Literature classes are more relevant to them with improved attendance and punctuality at school”. This comes across as patronising: it implies the classics are not accessible to ethnic-minority students, that there are books for white students and books for non-white students. In fact, books belong to everyone irrespective of their identity.
I believe in diversity if it’s the product of merit, and not when it is something enforced top-down out of a misguided notion of helping ethnic-minority students. The only way to effectively provide such students with the knowledge they can use to thrive in various aspects of life is by grounding them in the canon.
This doesn’t mean they should not read literature by black and brown authors — far from it. It is that these authors should be included on the basis of their literary qualities rather than their race.
The black writer W.E.B. DuBois lived from 1868 to 1963, a century in which African Americans experienced the evils of segregation and lynching. For DuBois, the canon was not something to be resisted but an essential part of his heritage. “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the colour line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls,” he argued. “From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
The kind of diversity often preached today emphasises separateness over unity. It presupposes that the classics are irrelevant, and implicitly suggests they are either impenetrable or uninteresting to today’s students. This should be resisted by anyone who believes literature is a universal pursuit.
Tomiwa Owolade is a freelance writer and the author of This is Not America, which is out in paperback in May.
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SubscribeWell said.
There is reading for entertainment and reading “for knowledge”.
Reading for knowledge is the subject in schools. It shouldn’t always be easy, sometimes challenging, often thoughtful. And quite often need reading two or three times before any of it really sinks in.
With all that is supposed to be happening in teaching English (both language and literature) I do wonder if the primary driver is to make the teachers life easier.
As a corollary to that, might it not be that new English teachers themselves struggle with the universal canon, having been inducted into their professional lives by an academe that’s been pursuing the edicts of “diversity” over universalism?
What hope then, of introducing young minds to the richness of human experience provided by those whose work has stood the test of time, regardless of any factor related to their identity?
It is reading for entertainment that gets children into the habit of reading. Probably writers who are no great shakes in terms of cultural merit are the ones who have the greatest hand in that.
Of course, “something else is suggested” by the diversity crowd. Usually, it’s a zero-sum game that erases anything from white, Western sources and replaces it with anything that is not white or Western, as if people are incapable of handling both.
In Canada, one library has removed or is removing all titles before 2008: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-library-book-weeding-1.6964332. Because nothing says learn from history quite like pretending that history began yesterday.
That news item from Canada is truly terrifying.
“[T]he Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising.” 1984, Orwell
Also, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera:
‘The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
Year Zero.
They’ll be coming after people with glasses next.
If financed from public funds, any such library should be closed or forced not to implement this policy.
So you get poor people, especially children, whose main source of books is the library cut off from the riches of pre-2008 literature, while the families who can afford books still have access to them. Intellectual apartheid.
Thoughtful piece! A major problem is that ‘diversity’ is a much-misused word.
I’ve never understood the idea of prescribed reading. Kids should be encouraged to read whatever interests them, whether it’s Dickens or comic books. I have always been a voracious reader. I absolutely hated reading Shakespeare. I loved reading Asimov. If reading is not pleasurable, what’s the point? Students who wish to pursue writing seriously will naturally be drawn to great authors.
Great article. It’s true that because of this hypersensitivity around diversity many British people have little to no knowledge of the cultural treasures left to them by some truly great writers. As stated such knowledge could be a source of unifying people no matter how different their superficial cultures might be.
Great literature is about sharing the human experience and growing wisdom and insights, it has the power to speak to any one no matter their race or ethnicity. When I read great Russian, Japanese, India writers etc I am not constantly made aware of “difference” or “diversity” but struck by the many attitudes, hopes, dreams, triumphs, tragedies, threats and dreads that we share as humans beings.
I’m writing badly but I have to say that this whole “diversity” grift has to end for there to be any hope for our futures – we need to find the things that connect us and stop allowing ourselves to be divided and sub-divided by endless bs.
My response to the institutional woke androphobic racism of the literary establishment is only to read books written by White men.
I understand, that is the reaction one could believe this insidious ideology was designed to provoke. Divide and rule.
Ironically, I am myself an immigrant.
Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face was my response to your post. You are missing out on so many great authors. Given the reference to him in the article you could try “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers.
A well meaning attempt to broaden the scope of what is taught in schools has morphed into an intolerant, censorious orthodoxy.
They removed Larkin and Heaney from the poetry curriculum a year or so back and introduced 20 new poets, none of whom were white or male, in a country that’s 85% white!
And we’re all supposed to stand around applauding.
The worst thing about it all is that my teenage kids know it’s a load of bullshit, and just work the system as best they can.
I read that first as “they removed Latin”. But they did.
We have a bookshop in Brighton which only sells books written by “people of colour”.
“Well meaning”? There’s nothing ‘well meaning’ about this racist policy. It is aimed at destroying white identity, culture and sense of history. It is disgusting and worthy only of comparison with the revolting régimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe and their like. I repeat: this is racism in action.
Sometimes it feels like many people actually can’t identify or empathise with people in a different situation to themselves. So seemingly they can’t read, for example, Pride and Prejudice because it is set in the past and they fail to see the universality of the characters situations, and only see the precise detail.
In Caucescu’s Romania, writers would ingratiate themselves with the Party by writing stuff they approved of. I read a novel by one of the sycophants – it was truly awful. This will be the end point here if writers are selected for their diversity and the topics they write about – rather than simply merit. I’m fond of a Lee Child/Jack Reacher every now and then – he should know better than to involve himself in this grift.
Precisely. Love the WEB Du Bois quote too.
It is the height of irony (and, yes, utterly patronising) that a bunch of modern celebrities proclaim, in the name of ‘diversity’, that centuries of literature containing the expanse of experiences and observances written by people who lived existences that it is hard for us to imagine, is inferior to anything selected purely on the visual appearance of a creator.
Frankly, in between Shakepeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, an occasional dunking in Nietzsche — not to mention a bit of Dickens for light relief — I don’t have no time for diversity.
But what utterly transfixes me is the interest in western music among the Chinese.
Good article.
The open letter asking for more ‘diversity’ in the English syllabus does not make sense. This is England and the English Literature syllabus should enable children to understand and appreciate appropriate prose and poetry from the English canon.
These appropriate works have been successfully taught in schools in the UK, and in fact across the world, for over a century; Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hardy etc have inspired Africans, Indians, Chinese and South Americans to write great works of literature themselves. As that is the case there is no reasonable argument to make it more “diverse”.
Of course what the Education Department could do is provide an International Literature GCSE as well as the English Literature one. You could do one or the other, or both. That might be a positive way forward.
I was surprised by how heavily American the Eng Lit A level was when my daughter did it some years ago, and I doubt if it has become any more cisatlantic in the intervening era.
Diversity is code for less white people
*Fewer
Apologies for the pedantry, and have an upvote with my compliments.
Pedants are welcome
That’s the spirit!
‘Malorie Blackman was one of the prominent authors behind an open letter calling for a more ‘diverse’ literature.’
As the great Mandy Rice-Davies would have said, ‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she?’
What’s Lee Child’s excuse?
This may not be truly related to the article but I am mystified beyond all reason by everyone’s seeming need to bow down at the altar of ‘diversity’ as if it is something which is even vaguely important or relevant. For a start what is even implied by the use of the term ‘diversity’? Why are so many people focussed on diversity, as an ideal or a worthy ambition, at all? It seems to me that the more we focus on ‘diversity’ the more divided we become as a nation. We the human race, as a species, are not in the least bit diverse at anything other than a superficial level. We may not all share the same colour skin or physical characteristics but we are one, single species. Take any male/female from any continent and transport them thousands of miles to a different continent where the people have different colour skin or physical characteristics and they can successfully procreate. We are one and the same and I just wish we could all remember that simple fact and not have to suffer the ideological lunacy of those who seek to divide us along lines of skin colour, race or ethnicity as a means of control and denigration.
The people who seek to ‘de-colonise’ the curriculum – whether that be in English Literature, Maths or Science – do so not to include anyone but to EXCLUDE white people’s influence from these subject areas. It is not even remotely inclusive nor is it carried out in the interest of diversity; it is done out of an irrational and implacable hatred of all things white and western. The same people, mark you, are more than happy to exploit the freedoms bestowed upon them by (white) Western culture and democracy and to enjoy the benefits of the welfare state that those same societies and cultures have made possible through industrial innovation and endeavour, as well as the benevolence of the tax-paying populations, without a qualm.
Some people study Wordsworths poem known as ‘Daffodils’ and conclude it is about the transcendent and transporting spiritual beauty of creation and the consoling virtue of hallowed memory.
Others think it is about the Daffodils.
Neither are incorrect, of course, but only the first person is talking about literature.
I fear the signatories to this letter all belong to the second tendency.
These authors, if they are so good, can’t possibly agree with the letter. It’s intimidation.
Good piece
Another excellent piece by this fine writer.
I, a female, have been mostly moved by male Russian writers, from Pushkin to Pelevin, despite not being Russian, or a man.
My mind has been energized by the Haitian Edwige Danticat and the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz who certainly don’t represent me ethnically.
As a child I felt closest to Jim Hawkins in ‘treasure island’ than to the girls in ‘ballet shoes’, yet I’m not “non binary”.
Yes, books belong to everyone and we can all find ourselves in a book.