Apparently Shakespeare is the latest victim of the culture wars, with some fearing the Bard is about to be thrown out of classrooms across England in the name of decolonisation. Wokeness has already culled the dead white man from American curriculums, we are told, so surely it won’t be long until we follow suit. Right?
But the inconvenient truth – which isn’t quite so headline-worthy – is that decolonising the curriculum isn’t about burning copies of Macbeth, or chucking Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in the bin. It’s not even about only studying writers from marginalised identities. As a mixed-race English teacher who believes strongly in diversifying the English syllabus, for me, it’s about re-examining the lens through which we view canonical texts in the first place – shifting it to become more critical, more aware of the systemic forces at play both within and around a text. Decolonisation may sound radical, frightening even to some, but this is what great English teaching already does.
