Taylor Swift and the tyranny of progressive 'education' - Opinion
In the United Kingdom, the Department of Education in Keir Starmer's neo-socialist government has just axed the Latin Excellence Programme. Over 5,000 students had benefited from this program over the past two years, over a third of them from economically deprived backgrounds. The Labour government claims that the axing is solely in order to cut costs, a claim that rings hollow considering that the program cost £4 million, far less than the government spends on plenty of overseas aid projects and certainly far, far less than is being spent on all the Net Zero vanity projects the progressives are committed to.
Is learning Latin useless and a waste of public money? Should all the subjects taught in schools (and universities) be reviewed according to strict utilitarian policies? In fact, what often underpins progressive ideas on education is not practicality but ideology. The problem with Latin is not that nobody speaks it anymore. It's that the teaching of it is perceived as elitist. Education, progressives say, is not about imparting and inspiring wisdom; it's about indoctrinating the right ideas, and foremost among the right ideas is that man is not just equal but must be made the same as everyone else.
If some of us can't get grammar right, then no one should
In fact, some of the pedagogical texts seen as seminal by those on the progressive-left openly describe the goal of teaching as the “attainment of social justice.”
One book, “Equity in Education: Levelling the Playing Field of Learning,” by Lee Elliott Major & Emily Briant, purports to be able to enter the minds of teachers across the country, stating that they enter the profession in order “to achieve the noble aim of social justice.”
The learners in front of you are yours,
they write (italics in the original). Yours in order to mold into mini-progressives, DEI warriors. But the movement toward equity is only in one direction: down.
Major and Briant, like many of their ilk, seek to “sweep away middle class advantage” by, for example, substituting “formal” language with more “casual” language that is more easily understandable to those from lower socioeconomic groups. The notion that children from disadvantaged homes might be better served by learning formal language than by being protected from it seems not to have occurred to them.
Shakespeare vs. Instagram
Similarly, progressives favor teaching texts written by and featuring people who are similar to the majority of students. While they are advocating for Shakespeare and other such “irrelevant” (and colonial) authors to be removed from the curriculum, what they wish to see replacing this material is modern “literature,” giving the word its broadest interpretation.
One prominent teacher who is not shy about voicing his opinions wrote in the Times of London that Shakespeare should be replaced by “lessons on Instagram posts.”
Meanwhile, an external government review has concluded that it would be wise for children to visit “graffiti workshops” instead of engaging in “high-brow pursuits” such as visiting museums, theaters, and art galleries. Graffiti workshops are apparently more “relatable.”
One educator described her frustration with the direction in which education appears to be going:
Instead of inspiring children with what can be attained, via thought, dedication, and effort, these progressives want our children to stagnate, to never aspire to anything beyond what they already know, and to be happy with that. This isn’t education — it’s the exact opposite.
Taylor Swift — aren't we lucky?
Are things any better in the United States? In Harvard, they still teach Shakespeare. But they also teach Taylor Swift.
“Some might be confused as to how Swift found her way onto a Harvard syllabus,” reads an article in The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper. How indeed did Taylor Swift find her way onto a Harvard syllabus? Via the efforts of Professor Stephanie Burt (who, despite his name, is a man).
The course is titled, “Taylor Swift and Her World” and it has attracted hundreds of students, delighting Burt who clearly feels that Swift’s fame is merited:
We are lucky enough to be living in a time when one of our major artists is also one of the most famous people on the planet. Why would you not have a course on that?
But he also considers the course to be useful in a practical sense:
I try to teach only the courses that I think our students can really use — either because students want them or because our curriculum needs them.
Never mind what the author meant — it's your truth
Why might a course centered around Taylor Swift be useful? Burt explains:
Taylor Swift is someone who establishes complicated and changing relationships to the idea of Americanness and to the idea of white Americanness and of middle America.
It appears that rather than studying Shakespeare, or Milton, or Dickens, and trying to understand what they thought and why, Burt is taking his own ideas and superimposing them on Swift’s lyrics. The course syllabus describes how students will,
... learn how to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts.
Do Swift’s songs have “queer subtexts”? Burt does not claim to have asked the singer for her opinion.
Why learn from someone who knows better when you can learn from someone just like you?
Burt also wants the course to supply students with beliefs on morality and sees no issue with deriving such lessons from a pop idol:
We will learn how to think about illicit affairs, and hoaxes, champagne problems and incomplete closure.
Indeed, Burt is open about his admiration for Swift as someone who seeks to guide her fans through the vicissitudes of life, stating that in one of her songs, she “establishes herself as the listener’s friend, someone who knows what you’re going through and can help guide you, like a fairy godmother.
When Burt does try to present Swift as somewhat worthy of entering the literary canon, his efforts are tortured, giving one line from a song as evidence: “Tell me what are my Wordsworth.”
According to Burt, this is a reference to the English poet and what Swift is saying is: “If you want to understand me better, and my time in England better, maybe you should go read some Wordsworth.”
But Burt isn’t teaching his students to read Wordsworth. He’s teaching them Taylor Swift and how to figure out life using the guidance of someone who appears just as messed up as they may be. Relatable is one way of describing this — education is not.
