They Stole Shakespeare from the Poor and Called It Progress
The most effective class weapon in modern Britain is not tuition fees. It is a reading list.
I grew up on benefits. Single mother. Government flat in Brisbane, Australia. The full catastrophe, as Zorba would say — though nobody in my school was teaching Kazantzakis. Nobody was teaching much of anything that might give a child born into poverty the vocabulary to describe, diagnose, and eventually escape the condition he was in.
Except, by some accident of timing or the residual stubbornness of an older curriculum, they were still teaching Shakespeare. And Milton. And Dickens. And Austen. And through those writers — dead, white, male, and more radical than any of the people now trying to cancel them — I received an education. Not a credential. Not a qualification. An education. The kind that changes the shape of a mind. The kind that teaches you that the world is not what the world tells you it is. The kind that a child from a council estate is not supposed to get and that, increasingly, in the name of progress, inclusion, and equity, the British educational establishment is making sure he won’t.
I have since obtained multiple postgraduate qualifications across several disciplines. The #DisruptTexts movement would call this the perpetuation of a meritocratic myth. I call it a Tuesday that almost didn’t happen.
The Heist
Here is what is happening, and I want to state it plainly because the people responsible have become extremely good at not stating it plainly.
The wealthy are keeping the Canon. The poor are losing it.
That is the sentence. That is the whole debate. Everything else is decoration.
England’s elite schools — the public schools, the independents, the schools that cost more per term than most families earn in a quarter — continue to teach Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Chaucer, Woolf. They do this for the same reason they have always done it: because it works. Because a child who has wrestled with the syntax of Paradise Lost can wrestle with anything. Because a child who has understood Iago understands office politics before they arrive at the office. Because the cultural references that structure elite discourse — in law, in politics, in journalism, in finance, in every corridor where power is exercised — are drawn overwhelmingly from these texts, and a child who does not know them is locked out.
These schools achieve A-level top grades at roughly double the rate of state schools. That gap is not closing. It is widening. And it has widened over precisely the period in which state schools have been enthusiastically dismantling the curriculum that the elite schools have kept.
Ofsted — the government’s own inspectorate — visited fifty schools in 2024 and reported that in a significant number of them, texts for English study are chosen not for their literary merit but for their connection to personal, social and health education topics, current affairs, or pupil interests. The result, in Ofsted’s own carefully measured language, is “a fragmented approach to the curriculum.”
Let me translate. A fragmented approach to the curriculum means: the children of the poor are being given literary scraps while the children of the rich feast. It means that a headteacher in Hackney is replacing Brave New World with The Hunger Games because the latter is more “relevant,” while a headteacher in Hampshire is teaching Brave New World alongside Homer because he understands that relevance is what you create through rigorous teaching, not what you pander to through easy substitution. It means that the single most valuable inheritance a state school can give to a disadvantaged child — the language of power, the cultural literacy that opens every door that money cannot buy — is being withdrawn, voluntarily, by the very people charged with providing it.
And the reason given for this withdrawal is inclusion.
There is a word for giving people less while telling them they are getting more. The polite term is marketing. The honest term is fraud.
The Arguments, and Why They’re Wrong
I am not going to pretend that the case for curriculum diversification is stupid. It is not stupid. It is sophisticated, well-funded, institutionally entrenched, and almost entirely wrong — which is a more dangerous combination than stupidity has ever been.
The construction argument. Canons are constructed. The Western Canon was assembled over centuries by people who had access to printing presses, education, and cultural authority, and those people were disproportionately white, male, and privileged. This is true. It is also irrelevant to the question of whether the resulting texts are educationally valuable. The periodic table was assembled by European scientists operating within colonial power structures. Nobody proposes decolonising chemistry. The double helix was discovered at Cambridge, an institution built on ecclesiastical wealth and class privilege. Nobody proposes replacing it with a more inclusive model of DNA. The value of a discovery — or a text — is independent of the biography of its discoverer. To argue otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy, and to commit it in a way that, applied consistently, would dismantle every intellectual achievement of the past three thousand years.
The engagement argument. Students engage more with texts that reflect their own experience. Undoubtedly. Students also engage more with TikTok than with trigonometry. Engagement is not an educational criterion. It is a marketing metric dressed in pedagogical clothing. The purpose of education is not to meet students where they are. It is to take them somewhere they could not go alone. A curriculum designed around what fifteen-year-olds already find interesting is a curriculum that has abandoned its reason for existing.
The Bourdieu argument. This is the clever one. The Canon functions as cultural gatekeeping. Its value is relational, not intrinsic — it matters because elite institutions say it matters, and their saying so is a mechanism of class reproduction. On this reading, teaching the Canon to poor children is not liberation but imposition.
The argument is elegant. It is also suicidal. If mastery of canonical texts is the price of admission to elite discourse — and Bourdieu is right that it is — then the correct response to this fact is not to withhold the price of admission from the children who most need to pay it. It is to give them the coin and let them spend it. Every progressive educator who argues for removing the Canon from state schools while sending their own children to schools that retain it has answered this question in practice. The answer is: they know. They know the Canon is the currency of power, and they are arguing, with impeccable theoretical sophistication, that other people’s children should not be given it.
The Bourdieu argument, taken to its logical conclusion, does not justify removing the Canon. It makes removing it an act of class warfare — waged downward, by the educated, against the children of the poor.
The colonial argument. The Canon is a product of empire and teaches students to internalise colonial values. This is the argument that collapses fastest under actual contact with the texts it claims to describe. Dickens’s entire body of work is an extended assault on class exploitation. Shakespeare’s history plays interrogate political legitimacy with a sophistication that most political science departments cannot match. Melville wrote one of the most sustained explorations of homoerotic intimacy in nineteenth-century literature. Mary Shelley invented science fiction as a warning about technological hubris. Woolf dismantled patriarchy before the word was fashionable.
To describe these writers as agents of Eurocentric propaganda is not criticism. It is confession — a confession that you have not read them. The Canon contains more subversion per page than the entire output of the contemporary social justice curriculum. The difference is that the Canon’s subversion is earned through aesthetic mastery rather than announced through ideological declaration, and that makes it harder to detect for people who have been trained to read for politics rather than for meaning.
What the Headteachers Said
I interviewed four headteachers for a study that formed part of my Master’s research (MA in Education, Brunell). One ran an English public school. One ran a rural Welsh state school. Two ran inner-London comprehensives serving low-income, ethnically diverse communities. Four people are not a data set. But what they said out loud is what the attainment data say in numbers.
The public school head described canonical texts as foundational — not because they are old, but because engagement with works of this complexity develops the analytical, rhetorical, and cultural capacities that elite institutions demand. He wanted his students to be politically active, culturally literate, and capable of independent judgement. He emphasised that canonical education is most critical for marginalised students and international students, because the Canon provides the cultural operating system of the society they need to navigate.
The state school heads operated on a different planet.
One described the Canon as “a throwback to the distant past” whose works reflect “attitudes of those people who had different sexual preferences and who supported war and empire.” Another called it “Eurocentric propaganda promoted by old white males.” A third explained that when forced to teach canonical texts, the school “tries to read them under a different perspective. For instance, how would an African-American character respond if they were a character in this book?”
I will leave aside the question of what it means to insert a hypothetical African-American character into a nineteenth-century English novel and ask instead a simpler question: which of these approaches is more likely to get a sixteen-year-old from a Hackney council estate into Cambridge?
The answer is not mysterious. The answer is the one that costs forty thousand pounds a year.
The philosopher Gert Biesta has spent decades asking a question that the people running British education appear never to have considered: what is education for? His answer distinguishes three domains. Qualification: the knowledge, skills, and cultural literacy that equip a person to participate in economic and political life. Socialisation: understanding the culture, traditions, and institutions of the society one inhabits. Subjectification: the formation of an autonomous self — a person capable of independent judgement rather than mere compliance.
Any serious education must serve all three. And the Canon, whatever else one thinks of it, is the single most efficient instrument ever devised for serving all three simultaneously. A student who has read Shakespeare is qualified — they possess the cultural references that structure elite discourse. They are socialised — they understand how their society has thought about power, justice, love, and death. And they are subjectified — they have been forced, by the sheer difficulty and beauty of the text, to form their own judgement, to wrestle with ambiguity, to discover what they think by thinking harder than they thought they could.
What Biesta calls “learnification” — the reduction of education to learning, of teaching to facilitation, of the relationship between teacher and student to a transaction between provider and consumer — is precisely what happens when you replace Shakespeare with The Hunger Games. The student is no longer challenged. They are accommodated. They are no longer transformed by the encounter with something greater than themselves. They are affirmed in what they already are. This is not education. It is customer service.
The public school head is educating students to understand the world as it is — which is the prerequisite for changing it. The state school heads are educating students to resent the world as it is — which is, whatever else it may be, not the same thing as equipping them to succeed in it. One approach produces fluency. The other produces grievance. Fluency gets you into the room where decisions are made. Grievance gets you a placard outside it.
Consider what the state school heads actually said — not paraphrased, not softened, but in their own words. One argued that the purpose of English education is to teach students “how to struggle against the existing system” so that “it might be possible for our students to gain power and control in their own lives.” Another said that the time spent helping struggling students understand archaic language in the classics is “wasted.” A third explained that differentiated programmes for students of different abilities “just promotes hierarchies and teaches students that they are not equal.”
Read those statements again. A headteacher in charge of disadvantaged children’s education has declared that the pursuit of excellence promotes inequality and must therefore be avoided. The pursuit of equality — defined not as equality of opportunity but as equality of exposure — has been elevated above the pursuit of quality. This is not inclusion. It is the abolition of aspiration, conducted in the language of compassion, and the children who will pay for it are the ones who cannot afford an alternative.
The Welsh head described the Canon as “a throwback to the distant past” whose works are “based on attitudes of those people who had different sexual preferences and who supported war and empire.” This is a description of Shakespeare — the writer who gave Portia the most devastating legal argument in English literature, who put the case against anti-Semitism into Shylock’s mouth three centuries before the concept existed, who explored gender fluidity with a sophistication that most contemporary theorists cannot match. To reduce this body of work to “old attitudes about sex and war” is not a critical reading. It is an admission that no reading has taken place.
The Democratic Scandal
Here is the question that nobody in the British educational establishment wants asked.
Who decided?
Not “should the curriculum change?” — of course it should. Canons have always evolved. But who decided that these changes, this fast, in this direction, with this little evidence? Who asked the parents? Who consulted the communities? Who ran the trials, collected the data, measured the outcomes, and demonstrated — with the rigour that any other policy intervention would require — that the replacement curriculum produces equivalent or superior educational results?
Nobody. Nobody did any of that.
What happened instead was institutional capture. After 2020, a professional consensus coalesced with startling speed among curriculum advisors, subject leads, exam board panels, education researchers, and university departments. BERA published a guide to decolonising the curriculum. Exam boards diversified their set text lists. Schools implemented changes. And at no point in this process was there a democratic mandate. No parent ballot. No community consultation. No public debate. No evidence.
The decisions were made by professionals, for professional reasons, within professional networks, and the accountability ran upward to regulators and funding bodies — not outward to the communities whose children were being experimented on. When a headteacher replaces Shakespeare with a young adult novel about identity on grounds of “relevance,” that is a political decision with educational consequences — and it is made with less democratic oversight than a local council applies to a parking scheme.
This is not conspiracy. It is something worse. It is governance by consensus among people who agree with each other, insulated from the feedback of people who might not.
The Economics Nobody Mentions
The vast majority of canonical texts are out of copyright. You can download the complete works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Milton, the Brontës, and a thousand others for nothing. Zero. The greatest curriculum in the history of human civilisation is free.
The replacement texts — the contemporary novels, the young adult fiction, the carefully curated diversity reading lists promoted by #DisruptTexts and its institutional allies — are copyrighted. They must be purchased at market rates, often from publishers and authors directly connected to the movements advocating their adoption.
Let that sink in. Elite schools save money by teaching Shakespeare. State schools spend money to replace him.
The people selling you the progressive curriculum have a financial interest in the progressive curriculum. This does not make them wrong. But it does mean that the political economy of curriculum reform deserves more scrutiny than it has received, and it has received approximately none.
There is something almost beautiful about the efficiency of this arrangement. The richest schools in the country teach the cheapest curriculum. The poorest schools in the country are persuaded — by consultants, by advocacy groups, by publishers with stock to shift — to spend money they do not have on materials of undemonstrated educational value, to replace materials of demonstrated educational value that are available for free. If a pharmaceutical company proposed replacing a proven generic drug with an expensive branded alternative on the basis of no clinical trials, regulators would intervene. In education, the same manoeuvre is called innovation.
The Self-Consuming Critique
There is a final irony that the decolonisers have not confronted, and I suspect they cannot confront, because confronting it would dissolve the ground beneath their feet.
The tools of critique they deploy against the Western Canon are themselves products of the Western Canon.
The tradition of questioning authority, of subjecting cultural assumptions to rational scrutiny, of insisting that power justify itself — these are not universal features of human civilisation. They are specific intellectual achievements, developed over centuries, within a specific tradition, and transmitted through a specific set of texts. The Greeks invented the examined life. The Enlightenment codified individual rights. The Romantics insisted on the sovereignty of the individual imagination. The Victorians developed the novel of social criticism. The modernists dismantled every inherited form and reassembled them in the image of radical freedom.
To dismantle this tradition in the name of critical thinking is not brave. It is not progressive. It is an act of intellectual auto-cannibalism — a tradition consuming the very organs that sustain it. You cannot critique the Canon with tools the Canon gave you and then claim the Canon has nothing to offer. Or rather, you can, but only if nobody is paying attention, and people are beginning to pay attention.
What Is at Stake
C. S. Lewis warned that when education becomes conditioning, citizens learn how to follow rules rather than how to think. Democracy is not a system in which people absorb information and vote as they are told. It is a system predicated on rational analysis, logical argument, and the capacity for independent judgement. These capacities are not innate. They are cultivated. They are cultivated through sustained encounter with texts of sufficient complexity to demand them — and a curriculum that replaces such encounters with texts selected for representational criteria is a curriculum that undermines the conditions for democratic life. Not in theory. In practice. In the classrooms where the next generation of voters, workers, citizens, and — if we are very lucky — leaders are being formed.
Vonnegut imagined a society in which equality was achieved by handicapping the gifted — by hanging weights on the graceful, putting static in the ears of the musical, and masking the beautiful. We are not there. But an educational system that reserves the language of power for those who can pay while withholding it from those who cannot has begun to rhyme with Vonnegut’s dystopia in ways that should alarm anyone who takes equality seriously.
The Canon gave me a life. I did not come from a family that discussed Locke at dinner. I did not have parents who could decode Shakespeare’s allusions or explain why Dickens matters. I had a curriculum. That curriculum was my inheritance — the only inheritance a poor child receives from a civilisation that did not plan for him. It was not designed for me, but it worked for me, because great literature does not care about your postcode. It demands that you rise to it, and in the rising, it transforms you.
The question is whether we will extend that demand to the next generation of poor children, or whether, in the name of compassion, we will lower the bar to the point where clearing it teaches them nothing.
The people making this decision have not asked the people it affects. They have not produced evidence that their alternative works. They have not subjected their programme to democratic scrutiny or measured its outcomes against any framework more rigorous than their own professional consensus. They have simply acted — with the confidence of people who have mistaken institutional momentum for moral authority, and who will not be present when the bill comes due.
That bill will not be paid by the children of the decision-makers. Their children are at schools where Shakespeare is not under negotiation. The bill will be paid by the children who have no voice in the matter and no means of escape — the children on council estates, in underfunded comprehensives, in classrooms where “inclusion” has become a synonym for the systematic withdrawal of the one resource that might actually include them in something worth being included in.
They stole Shakespeare from the poor and called it progress.
It is not progress. It is the oldest trick in the class playbook: ensuring that the children at the bottom stay at the bottom, while the adults at the top congratulate themselves on their enlightenment.
The Canon is not a monument. It is a ladder. And they are pulling it up.