#how even

Thank you to everyone who got me to 50 likes!

Instead of teaching students how to engage critically with difficult, historical, often uncomfortable literature, we are apparently deciding the better solution is to remove it altogether.

This is not some random obscure shock-text. This is Geoffrey Chaucer. This is a cornerstone of English literary history. This is one of the texts that helps explain how English narrative, satire, social critique, and characterization developed.

Yes, it contains bawdy material. Yes, it contains things that are uncomfortable. It is medieval literature. It reflects a flawed society because that is what literature does.

The purpose of education is not to hand students only polished, sanitized works that never offend anyone. The purpose of education is to teach them how to read, interpret, question, contextualize, and think.

If a school system is more threatened by students reading The Canterbury Tales than by students growing up unable to grapple with nuance, irony, historical context, or moral complexity, then the problem is not the book.

The problem is a culture of censorship dressed up as care.

At this point, we are not protecting students from literature.

We are protecting institutions from intelligent discussion.