Homer Removed From School Curriculum

Those Massachusetts Puritans. Yeah, just lately a ninth-grade teacher in Lawrence, Massachusetts succeeded in removing Homer's Odyssey from the curriculum of the school where she teaches, [PS: It seems the Odyssey may have been removed from a single class, not from use by the entire school. I was taken in by right-wing sources who deliberately exaggerated the affair to suit their agenda and stir up fears of cancel culture. I'll try to be more careful. Amusingly, however, because this post contained that error, a link to it was removed from a sub-Reddit.] but 330 years ago they were executing people they believed to be witches, so in a way this is progress. I bet those witch-burners didn't read Homer either.

 

In an online discussion of this curriculum change, someone said that in the case of this school in Massachusetts, no one was being told not to read Homer, because he was not being removed from the curriculum of a Classics department. 

Of course people are being told here not to read Homer. That is literally no more and no less than what this little news item is about. The ninth-grade students of this teacher, who is being paid by some public or private entity to tell them what to think of this or that author, are being told not to read Homer. Now how will these kids understand the jokes in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

And if this particular school ever had a Classics department, I'm pretty sure it was removed from the school some time ago. As have many other Classics departments in the US and elsewhere. Don't tell me that there's no connection between removing Homer from an English or comparative lit curriculum and removing an entire Classics department from the face of the Earth, cause I ain't quite that stupid, cause I've read a lot of good books including some stuff by Homer! So just, don't!

It's true that there has been a lot of sexism, racism, classism and other forms of bigotry in the teaching of the Classics over the course of the centuries. I think the thing to do is to remove the sexism, racism, classism and other forms of bigotry from the teaching of the Classics, rather than removing the Classics themselves. When Homer is removed from curricula, when Classics department are done away with, although it's usually done in the name of the Left, all that is accomplished is that all of that good stuff once again becomes the preserve of the bigots. This is not an advance, it's a retreat.

The same holds true with those among Catholic Leftists who identify Latin masses, and the study of Latin (and therefore also Greek because they're really not wholly separable) in general with the Right. The Left needs to go into, much further into the study of the Classics. 

Buy some copies of Homer and smuggle them into the benighted town of Lawrence. Help those kids out.