I just realized something that’s been sitting with me for years—quietly ironic and maybe a little tragic.
Back in school, I had a literacy teacher devoted to political correctness long before it became the norm. She rarely pushed it openly; instead, she used favored students as vessels to voice the “right” ideas, supporting them quietly. If someone said something unapproved, they were corrected. But if a favored student made sweeping, moralizing statements, she nodded, smiled, and gave them the floor. As Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” In her classroom, the mind was shaped to favor one place—her ideology.
She knew her English literature well. We read the canon—Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare—and she treated it like sacred ground. Yet she refused to let us wrestle with those texts honestly, preferring group discussions that rewarded moral performances, not genuine learning. It reminded me of Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” But in her class, the “play” was a stage for political theatre rather than the true conscience of literature.
One of Edmund Spenser’s lines comes to mind:
“Sweet is the rose, but grows upon a briar;
Sweet is the juniper, but sharp his brier.”
Our classroom, much like Spenser’s briar, had a sharpness that pricked beneath the surface of sweetness.
And then, one day, it all snapped into focus.
We were discussing a handicapped character. I raised the point that people with disabilities are often idealized, reduced to symbols rather than complex individuals. They become moral props, “inspirational” by default. This flattening felt dehumanizing. As Chaucer wrote in The Canterbury Tales,
“Time and tide wait for no man.”
In the rush to moralize, we lost sight of the true and complex passage of human experience.
Then one of the favored girls interrupted, saying, “Well, I love all handicapped people.”
I was stunned. I instinctively pushed back, saying, “You can’t love someone just because they’re handicapped.” Love, I meant, must be rooted in character and reality, not simply identity. I couldn’t say it well, but I knew it was true. Milton might have said, “The mind, in its own shadow and darkness, can be deceived.” I felt the room turn dark.
And turn it did. The class turned on me, questioning my morality. How could I not love all handicapped people? What kind of person was I? It was no longer about my point, but about my supposed failings.
Wordsworth’s insight feels fitting here:
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
But no room was made for such quiet, difficult reflection in that classroom—only loud condemnation.
The teacher said nothing. She let the favored student’s statement stand unchallenged, allowing the group to shame me silently. She was not a victim of this shift; she was its vanguard. While others taught literature straightforwardly, she enforced language policing and moral theater.
The very ideology she supported has since dismantled the literature she loved.
As Shakespeare wrote in King Lear,
“When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.”
Her classroom was one such stage—where the revolution does not just eat its children; it eats its teachers too.
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