Meanwhile, in San Francisco the militia of multiculturalism is
working overtime to enforce intellectual mediocrity and strict
adherence to a politically correct reading list. According to a
Reuters news report, school board officials are considering a
proposal requiring that up to 70 percent of school reading be books by
“authors of color.” “The proposed change,” we are told, “would
force high school teachers to select up to seven books by non-white
authors for every three traditional classics by white writers.”

One board member—a twenty-four-year-old co-author of this
“multicultural initiative”—declared that such a change was “long
overdue” and that it would make school work more “relevant” to
students in San Francisco’s public schools, where whites count for
something less than 12 percent of the student population. Reflecting
on the dismal scholastic record of African-American and Latino
students, this gentleman took aim at the reading list: “Part of the reason
is that the curriculum is not engaging them. Students get more
interested in reading and language when they see themselves in the
curriculum.” Among other things, what we have here is a classic case
of what G. K. Chesterton called “the false theory of progress,
which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the
test.” Then, too, we wonder what happened to the idea that great
literature expands one’s imaginative horizons? Who has thoughtfully
read
Homer, or Virgil, or Dante, or Shakespeare, or Milton and not “seen
themselves”—and the world—more fully for the experience? And when it
comes to “relevance,” the primary question is not whether Homer, for
example, pertains to the narrow experience of an uneducated teen in
Southern California but whether that teenager’s limited sympathy
might be engaged and ennobled by something much larger and more
lasting than his fleeting adolescent passions.

Such objections apparently do not matter among the
PC police in San Francisco. Another
board member who supports the initiative pondered the political
failures of the traditional curriculum: “Mark Twain’s Huckleberry
Finn, for instance, has a bias against African Americans. And
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, while a great work, has an economic
bias. It characterizes people based on their class.” What can we
say? It is not clear whether the appropriate response to such
statements is outrage or pity. On balance, we think perhaps a
mixture of both is called for. Pity is surely the right response
when faced with such intractable stupidity: “It
characterizes people based on their class”—shouldn’t a person
capable of uttering such reductive gibberish about The Canterbury Tales get some sort
of government grant, perhaps under the Americans with Disabilities Act?
But outrage, too, is required: after all, what we are talking about
here is the possibility that many thousands
of students in
San Francisco will be cheated of a decent education in order that
the demands of certain politically correct ideologues be appeased.
In the end, anyone who cares about the students’ welfare
must give
precedence to the outrage.