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One phrase was going through my head as I read through this thread: permanent underclass.
The fact is that good quality high schools, even public ones, are still teaching the proper literary classics. Many others, including those with high minority enrollment, are receiving a substandard English education. Can you imagine denying minority high school students the opportunity to read great literature because it was all written by white people? Bitter irony there.
When I was in high school, the process of countering for white-male-ness had already begun. In the same class I read "Pride and Prejudice" and "Hamlet", I was also forced to suffer through "Things Fall Apart", a vastly inferior novel. Facts are facts: the greatest authors of all time (at the very least until 50 years ago) were all white men. Teachers can feel free to deny this obvious point, but the consequence is that the quality of literature in schools gets worse and worse.
And as I said before, this is precisely the sort of trend that leads to increased class stratification. People who cannot read complex texts do not become lawyers or professors or historians or...
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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