Our Secretary of Education Chooses Harry Potter over Shakespeare; Lord What Fools These Mortals Be

Yesterday, our erudite Secretary of Education, the woman who is charged with the responsibility of leaving no child left behind, left the Bard behind. When asked, on NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday" what she would read if she had all the time in the world, she replied: "WelI, I should probably say the complete works of Shakespeare or something like that, but really, if I had all the time in the world I'd love to read all the Harry Potter books from start to finish."

Ironically, she's taking the side of the liberals in the Culture and Gender Wars, and rejecting the Leader of the Dead White Males for the formerly unemployed British single mom. But of course, that wasn't Ms. Spellings' motivation. The woman was being perfectly honest, a strikingly unusual posture for someone in the Bush administration. She happily and publicly conceded that for her, slogging through Shakespeare is about as appealing a prospect as patrolling Anbar Province, while shelpping 50 pounds of equipment in the summer heat.

There's a lot of her boss packed into that statement, of course. It's a smarmy rejection of intellectualism, an attempt to connect via the lowest common denominator. It's unflattering in a politician; unforgivable in an educator.

Ms. Spelling should be inspiring our students to appreciate the richness of language and character that Shakespeare represents, the guy who, in the words of Harold Bloom (who incidentally has no patience with Potter) was responsible for the "invention of the human." Now we know that the woman who is ostensibly the steward of millions of malleable minds,
is depressingly, but not unexpectedly, a boring and shallow culture-phobe. Madame Secretary is so secure in her dumbed-down-ness that she doesn't even feel the need to pretend to be interested in reading "Hamlet" for the fifth time, or "Winter's Tale" for the first.

It's fine to be a pop-culture junky, but the dismissiveness of "...I should probably say" -- which proudly asserts that her honesty compels her to admit her shallowness, -- is simply rebarbitive.

Needless to say, Shakespeare is rich with valuable lessons for the current administration, cautionary tales of the limits of power, ambition, justice and the fate of political dynasties. The fact that our Secretary of Education would choose to escape in Harry Potter is about as comforting as the FBI Director choosing the Hardy Boys as his summer reading.

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