On Shakespeare, I think that it's a shame to remove it from the curriculum. Shakespeare is part of civilization, his mesages go beyond ethnicity as many themes are universal. I think we really need to be careful about being too politically correct. By the same token classics from other cultures deserve our time and attention as well because other cultures are as valid as the "white man's" culture just by the virtue of their existence.

We also live in an age where not only our culture but other cultures lack morality and in many respects integrity. We seem to be limited in knowing how to be and how to be (behave) in our relationships. We can only really deal with these issues by knowing what we were, where we have been and how we got here. In other words we need to learn about our humanity and why civilization occured. (Plato, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Voltaire and others all had so much to teach us not only within the context of their own times but as who we are as human beings.) If we only focus on the here and the now as is suggested by the proposed curriculum change in Britain, the next generation will have an even more limited view of our culture and civilization. We owe it to ourselves to pass along as much knowledge about our past to our children as possible. Because who are they without the past?