- Flickr user Apaché
- Last week the Tucson School Board terminated its ethnic studies program, releasing a list of books that, as of last Friday, must be purged from its schools. On the list is Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
At issue is an Arizonian law that took effect Jan 1, 2011. According to USA Today it “bans classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, encourage resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed solely for students of a certain ethnic background and advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of students as individuals.” Which, you’ll know if you’ve read The Tempest, is exactly what the play is about.
Teachers have been told by administrators to avoid texts where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes.”
Also on the banned list is the twenty-year-old textbook Rethinking Columbus, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America: A History of Chicanos.
For more, read the original report over at Salon.
