https://spectator.us/topic/chasing-chaucer-beowulf-curriculum/
In British and American universities, fewer and fewer students are studying English, history and other humanities. That’s a job killer for the faculty. It’s time for quick answers — and the English faculty at Leicester University has come up with a beauty. The problem with their curriculum, they have decided, is that it is just not left-wing and anti-Western enough. They must figure students want to study English mostly to learn more about imperialism, capitalism and social theory, not to read and interpret great novels and poetry or to read modern works against the background of a great tradition.
So, out with the old, in with the new. In this case, ‘the new’ reflects the tendentious political preoccupations of the faculty and their most agitated students. At Yale, which has had one of the greatest English departments in the world for decades, the students demanded removal of Shakespeare’s portrait. It’s gone. No problem. Yale’s art history department killed off its iconic course on architectural history because they deemed it too Western. Oh, the horror. No matter that it was the department’s most popular course by far. Leicester’s English faculty decided to drop its traditional requirement for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the medieval epic ‘Beowulf’. All gone, sent to the rice paddies to learn from the glorious peasants.
What’s wrong here? And what’s right? There’s nothing wrong with including some social theory in the humanities. But this theoretical work should meet two criteria. It should be first-rate, not inferior, ideological claptrap, as so much of it is. Second, it should supplement essential works in the curriculum, not supplant them. The goal is to build upon students’ prior knowledge of foundational works in their field. That means English students should read Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser and Marlowe before they read social critiques of Elizabethan England. They should read Dickens and his contemporaries before they read Marx and Mill. Why? Because the overriding goal for English students should be to enrich their study of literary texts. These primary and secondary categories would reverse for students of sociology. They might be asked to read imaginative literature to enrich their understanding of social structure.
