Do the classics belong in our classrooms? A big topic with an even larger answer. For many these questions are one of the most debated in their career or life, so you may be questioning how we can summarise into one answer. Well it's rather simple: yes. We have all contemplated saying no dew racism in our books and how it was so hard for people to get published in the time of the classics, but to stop teaching them would be to stop teaching our history, and how we use to treat minorities, how wrong we were in our past as well as how far we have come. We can only see our achievements if we have something to compare it to, the classics belong in that regard as well.

 

To continue removing the classics from our curriculum would be like taking some of the best pieces of art out of our galleries because they weren’t created by people of the modern day. If you were to read any Shakespeare, for example, you would think the way he crafts his words is like a form of art - he has created something beautiful and incredible for us to study and perform, so removing it from our curriculum or classrooms as “a relic from our past'' would be such a tragic loss. On the other hand we could bring up the point of how they were mainly created by people, who were white, most likely privileged and male. The few cases where a woman or other minority has been a writer we have studied have been rare and far between, to add insult to injury most of these writers had to claim to be male or white to make sure they could be published.

 

So what could be the solution? Well there are many possibilities. We could censor our books to be more up-to-date with the current thoughts about what we can and cannot write. But no solution goes without its flaws. When we tried to censor Roald Dahl books it was met with a large amount of criticism and the decision was almost instantly taken back. You may argue we could update the classics and the collection we consider today by adding books from more modern authors, a bit like the modern poetry curriculum with poems such as “Checking Out Me History” by John Agard . This would allow us as people to update the classics but still learn from our mistakes. To conclude the lengthy topic I will end in a way I think is most fitting; there is no perfect solution to the debate of what to do with the classics but we can tell that they should still be taught. Anyway, they’re called the classics for a reason.