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Borges: Neither James Baldwin nor Walt Whitman are or ever were necessary to or desirable for the education of my children or sufficient moral exemplars to be held up as though they were. Shakespeare is and was. The homosexuality of Baldwin and Whitman is no more an intellectual or moral credential for them as writers than the unlamented Mapplethorpe's perversions were qualifications ranking him as an artist.

Neither Beckett nor Pinter nor Ginsberg nor their ilk are necessary or desirable to the education of my children. Purely on the "merits", their "work" is trash.

How you handle your kids' education is your business and how I handle my kids' education is mine.

Isn't that the real point of the entire controversy in this thread? Conservatives respect that choice by parents. Supporters of socialist funded education do not. Our leftist enemies want to cram amoral and immoral leftist agitprop down the throats of everyone's children at everyone's forced expense and enforce societal ignorance and error while they are at it.

If the text is what matters to you, you will get more out of Shakespeare than will the everyday English Literature professor who does in fact want his/her students to know what (he/she imagines) Shakespeare meant to say when writing the precise opposite. My kids get the point by reading Shakespeare without the socialist prism getting in the way.

Interesting points. We've been around the literature tree before, and I always pick up good suggestions from other FReepers.

However, I'm leaving FR for the Advent season, starting tomorrow, so I won't even start with my "Who needs fiction when you've got history" argument :-).

A lot of time the time an author can indeed put across the exact opposite of what he intended. His claims for what he meant should not be an impediment to others' interpretation.

I didn't claim that the sexuality of Messrs. Whitman or Baldwin is a merit. Whitman is leftist agitprop? He revolutionized American verse and his influence is with us still. Any survey of American literature without him is incoherent. It would be like reducing Thoreau to Environmentalist Agitprop. And I'm speaking as someone with a Post Graduate degree in English Literature. The question is one of objective standards of a Literary Canon which the Leftists have been trying to dismantle for years and with whom you apparently agree as you want to leave out key figures in Western Literary history.

I should state that it's nothing personal. Just a philosophical discussion. It reminds of an interview with Bob Jones III of Bob Jones University fame. He stoutly claimed that there is no way his Institution would ever teach the likes of Tennessee Williams or D.H. Lawrence. It was comical and sad.