#DisruptTexts has a clearly defined interdisciplinary scholarly theoretical foundation that can be read. But its critics never engage with the readings or ideas. They just bemoan any push against the status quo. They don't care about intellectual curiosity. They care about power.

There's decades of scholarship on the "canon wars," but the "canon defenders" just invoke "woke," "political correctness," "cancel culture," and "SJW warriors" as arguments. There's no scholarly engagement. It's just throwing a fit that people would challenge what's been done.

And that's been the play for decades! Today's "cancel culture" was yesterday's "cultural decline." Same shit, new syllable construction. There's always a market for this nonsense, but rarely are the "canon defenders" (or whatever) asked to engage in the movements they bemoan.

And that's one thing that makes these "debates" so lop-sided. You have to learn & know the canon & its construction to unpack, challenge, & rethink it. You don't have to do any ideological engagement to complain about movements challenging the canon. And you still get published!

Perhaps the strangest thing about the "canon defenders" is the avoidance of a pretty important question: Does only teaching the canon the way it always gets taught engage students in reading? It seems like it doesn't! The role of reading seems to get ignored in these "debates."

You could argue (rather successfully, I think) that #DisruptTexts approaches the teaching of canonical texts in ways that make the texts *more* engaging. But the "canon defenders" (or w/e) rarely seem interested in that point. Again, it's about power not intellectual curiosity.

Some of the "defend the canon" (or w/e) rhetoric also feels like maintaining a hierarchy of professions: "How dare k-12 *teachers* challenge the idea of literary merit established by ~*~academics~*~?" "What could a HS ELA teacher know that Harold Bloom didn't?" etc. etc.

And of course said hierarchy is always shaped by racism, sexism, classism, and the other systems of oppression that ruin everything.

(And I use ~*~academics~*~ specifically to evoke the likes of Harold Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, etc. not the awesome folx doing awesome work.)

So some of the "defend the canon" (or w/e) rhetoric feels like a way to thwart teachers' intellectual autonomy and curricular investigations. *Those* K-12 teachers need to know their place. If the Most Important Thinkers Ever say the canon matters then it matter! etc. etc.

TL;DR: That WJS piece, like so many pieces before it, is all revanchist pearl-clutching that masquerades as concern for the future of students. It's nothing more than a white temper tantrum; it is trash.

And it belongs where all trash belongs: