Firing the Canon

Think back to high school. Which books were you required to read? Or narrow it down: which books by British writers were you required to read?

Your collective answers define arguably the best known example of a canon.

Imagine that you’re listening to the radio. Classic rock radio specifically. Over the course of six hours, what bands are you 100% confident you’ll hear?

Your collective answers define another canon.

Long time META-SPIEL readers will recognize my own long-term obsession with the classic rock canon. I use the word “canon” to describe this, even though I’ve encountered almost nobody else who does, because I feel like classic rock radio is sort of a condensed version of the canon of British literature. Whatever all is in there - good or bad - necessarily excludes other things from inclusion. But also, the canon itself sort of bumps out other things which couldn’t qualify for the canon.

We were required to take four English classes in high school. One of those four was explicitly a British Literature class. This was at a rural high school, where there literally weren’t any alternatives available. Setting aside the obvious point that there were no Americans writing in English at the time of Shakespeare… why exactly did we need to have an entire year devoted to British literature?

In the last couple of weeks I’ve come across a couple of articles which have clarified things for me.

This long piece from The New York Times Magazine focuses on a classics scholar, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who is from the inside tackling the inherent whiteness of the discipline. There’s a lot to digest in this, but I found this section especially illuminating:

American high school education, of course, still heavily incorporates classics. Didn’t we all read The Odyssey? I went to high school in the early 1990s. I learned more about the Trojan War than I did about the Vietnam War.

The long piece wound up being buttressed by this extract from The Guardian written by Alice Te Punga Somerville, a scholar of Māori literature (Māori being the indigenous people of New Zealand.) The context is more so the idea that there’s also a Māori canon. Along the way, she shares this fascinating paragraph:

English as a distinct field of study, then, originated neither in England or America, but rather in India, as a colonial assimilationist strategy.

I lack the knowledge to cleanly tie together the advent of English as a discipline in colonial India and why exactly we were reading Julius Caesar in high school. My point is not that we should not have been reading it. Rather, my point is that the overall context of our reading it was clearly steeped in this long pedagogical lineage which began with an obsession with classics and which carried through to an obsession with English, all of which was absolutely caught up in whiteness.

I’m the president of the PTO at our elementary school. This is a fairly small district, consisting of five elementary schools and one junior high school. The district’s big initiative right now is equity. The brochure the district has put out defines equity as the absence of avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people achieved by providing all with resources, and opportunities that fit their circumstances. Certainly part of any meaningful equity initiative must be the idea that students can experience learning that respects their circumstances, a key element of which being that they must at some point be able to have teachers who look like them.

Since I’m not a teacher, and since my own child is well-served by the existing privilege system, I lack insight into some of what can or should be done in terms of how teachers can go about doing their jobs. I freely admit that.

What I think I do have a much stronger understanding of, though, is curriculum. While I was in graduate school, I read James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. I had an immediate understanding of what Dr. Loewen was getting at. I’d been reading history from a young age, but my high school U.S. History class was a bore, a series of matching tests pulled from textbook facts, overseen by a teacher who probably should have at best been a gym teacher.

As a teaching assistant at Ohio State, I had my own twice-weekly recitation sections with students in survey-level U.S. history classes. Informed by reading Loewen, at one point I started asking them this simple question: How far did your U.S. History class in high school get to? My own class basically ended at 1945, except for the three days at the end of the year where we watched a VHS recording of the ABC News special 45-85, and the one day that a Vietnam vet came into class. My students at OSU were roughly 5 years behind me, and it turned out, many of them had the same answer I did: they only got as far as 1945. One student said she only got as far as 1918! I had many students remark that they’d never learned about the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, or Watergate, and a couple even added that maybe if they had, they would have actually liked history. But I’ll bet you this: They all learned about the Trojan War.

The centrality of classics and English to the overall scaffolding of education in Anglophone countries has never been more clear to me than it is now after reading these articles. In turn, the pedagogical importance of deconstructing this scaffolding also comes into focus. Deconstruction is not the same thing as destruction. I’d submit that a through proper understanding of American history absolutely requires some level of study of Greek and Roman history. But what it also requires is the challenge of such study, as opposed to the base presentation of such inheritances as mere heritage.

Kids are not idiots. I’m not exactly saying that deconstruction needs to be introduced to first graders! But I am saying that there are ways of teaching things where certain inherent assumptions aren’t just presented as banal facts, but rather offered up as things to be considered.

As the Times article references, white supremacist groups - notably including people who stormed the Capitol - have coopted imagery from ancient civilizations. This makes sense. When you step back and understand the throughline - the association of the Greeks and Romans with the word civilization, the ideological inheritance of Greek thought through English politics, the further realization of the Greek and Roman ideal embodied in the birth of the new nation of America - well, nobody had to even talk about how and why this as all so important. Of course we’re talking about what passes today for civilization, which naturally implicitly excludes all non-Western models from being able to be the best civilization.

Well, ask yourself this: Is what happened at the Capitol on January 6 indicative of the best civilization? Is what happened at the Capitol on February 13, when 43 assorted bullies and cowards cast “no” votes, indicative of the best civilization? And yet that throughline is there, isn’t it? Doesn’t it stand to reason that there’s something deeply wrong with that throughline?

For what it’s worth, I don’t see how our school district can meaningfully tackle issues of equity without a very deep dive into the curriculum, and that is a point I am going to continue to emphasize from the little outpost of power I have.

It also may seem incongruous for me to dive into something very heavy by once again referencing something as seemingly banal as classic rock radio. But, straw man so placed, now I tear it down: Not only is classic rock radio an interesting mechanism by which we can understand the creation of a canon, I will also assert that the deep whiteness of the genre both reflects and props up the dominant paradigm surrounding. I’ll even argue that it’s not coincidence that it’s called “classic” rock. Yes, the entire genre ultimately eminates from white boys in England listening to blues men from America. But you never actually hear those blues men on the radio. I’m not arguing that this is some sort of racist decision on the part of programmers. But I am arguing that the paradigm is so steeped in whiteness that it must be deconstructed. Does anyone think for a second that Make America Great Again is somehow disjointed from the nostalgic imagery about the 1950s conjured by American music and film from the 1970s?

Again, the point here is not that we shouldn’t be reading Julius Caesar or that we shouldn’t be listening to Bob Seger. Alice Te Punga Somerville, in writing about the Māori canon, emphasizes that the issue isn’t what’s included:

Her point, rather, is that the canon as container is the problem, not the canon as contents, and so the solution is not exactly to scrutinize the contents as though the canon is just a zero-sum game where adding something requires removing something else. Learning is not a zero-sum game.

To put it another way: the problem with a high school student learning more about the Trojan War than the Vietnam War isn’t necessarily that too much time is spent on the Trojan War. But if across history and literature classes in high school curriculum is regarded as a zero-sum game - anything you try to add necessitates removing something else, because high school has a finite number of weeks - well, this substantially explains why we never got beyond 1945. And, indirectly, subconsciously, embedded in this pedagogical construct is an ideological reinforcement of zero-sum thinking, which in turn translates to ideas like how government welfare programs are seen as robbing Peter to pay Paul. (Or… maybe it’s not all so indirect and subconscious after all?)

If a canon, then, is understood as a container, then initiatives like our district’s equity initiative need to think not in terms of swapping some things out of the container and swapping other things in, but rather about how to blow up the container itself. Yes, there are necessarily finite aspects to education - the school day, the school year, the need to fit in numerous other requirements. But our brains are not finite. The brains of children in particular are effectively infinite. Finding ways to challenge them to expand their thinking both in and out of class, rather than approaching their minds as different types of containers, is central not just to equity, but to - dare I say it? - civilization itself.

I still think kids should read Shakespeare and Dickens and the like. But I think it can be done better. I think more can be included. I think we need to recognize that equity and sameness are actually antagonistic concepts. I think we need to challenge why things are studied, and embed such challenges in the very study of those things. Again, kids are not idiots.

I’m decades removed from being in high school myself, and I do believe that a lot of this has improved over time, and I’m just behind the times in some of what I’m saying. But I also know that Dr. Loewen’s work remains as relevant as ever. I, for one, will continue to do my part to subvert the dominant paradigm, for the benefit of my child and all children. I encourage you to do the same.