THE inmates have surely taken over the asylum this time. Academics at Cambridge University have registered their alarm and concern after discovering students were being cautioned that Shakespeare's plays may contain potentially distressing topics. Among other English Faculty Notes on Lectures, the poor wee sensitive undergraduates have been advised by "trigger warnings" (red triangles with an exclamation mark inside at the side of the course timetables) that Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors may involve "discussions of sexual violence" and "sexual assault". Nor is Cambridge alone in its thoughtfulness for the bright young movers and shakers of the future, either. The sensitive souls attending Oxford University, too, have also been protected with lw lecturers delivering the aforementioned trigger warnings concerning cases involving violence and/or death and the advice that students could leave if they were worried the content of such lectures might be too "distressing". I kid you not, dear reader. And before you go thinking that these establishments have always been on the wrong side of outre, our own Dear Green Place, Glasgow University, has alerted theology students to the notion, heaven forfend, that they may be subjected to distressing images of Jesus Christ and The Crucifixion and in that knowledge, give them the opportunity to leave the room.
Where once a place at university afforded those fortunate to experience there the unrestricted freedom to wrestle with the entire complex panoply of life in all its nakedness, now Taliban-like political correctness and the contorted logic of the fundamentalist stalk its halls with subversive, life-atrophying nonsense.
Sylvia Plath, wanted "to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in (my) life." Khaled Hosseni, author, among other novels, of The Kite Runner believes "it is better to be hurt by the truth than comforted by a lie." Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, too, tells us that "you cannot gain peace by avoiding life".
In all walks of life, the time is fast approaching, if it's not already too late, to stop swaddling our young in threadbare sheets of 24/7 care, and risk, and fear of failure and, rather, let them inhale unrestricted the inspirational breath of the curious travellers who wander through the dangerous depths of emotion, the terrors of intellectual warfare, the mental mountains of personal doubt towards the sunlit uplands of true freedom ... and life.
Gerard McCulloch,
47 Moffat Wynd, Saltcoats.
THE current general indecision in politics is a sign that the incumbents are mediocre.The NHS and everything else is dying of poverty. John Swinney offers money to fund the "training" of maths and science teachers, as if it could make any difference. Teaching really is a vocation: you don't have a choice: it is a passion. If not, it is done badly.
An interesting question is: how has it changed in 50 years? The assumption most people have is that it is better. Not so.
That children can now find out almost anything on their phones is not the advance it seems. Many can't spell, can't calculate without a device and worse: have no idea if their answer is "reasonable". How does it help a child to be asked to "make a poem'" when she has no concept of what a poem is no experience, still less knowledge of many very good poems: mental furniture that enriched many great minds?
In the 19th century we had four prime ministers who were superb. Two were double firsts in classics and maths: Peel and Gladstone. No one now is educated that way. They had to learn everything: commit it to memory. They all worked themselves to death because they had been inspired to work all day, day after day. That was the ideal: serving the country. Forty hours a week were spent on Classics. Now, the Cambridge Classics syllabus assumes that there will be no time to learn anything properly. So translations are presented with the vocab "necessary" underneath. What is being learned? How to translate? No. You don't learn to write and speak Latin, not even to translate it properly. The object of the exercise is to achieve some slight acquaintance with Latin, in the time now available: an hour or two a week. And so, whereas in the 19th century our leaders could absorb everything known and act upon it, accurately and rigorously, now, none of our leaders can learn all the stuff, absorb all the comment and make the necessary decisions which can take us forward to the brilliant future of yore.
We have allowed our education to become mediocre and it is no surprise that our politicians are mediocre.
William Scott,
23 Argyle Place, Rothesay.
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