Celia Walden
Now what’s wrong with university students?
Homework is hard, growing up is hard, life is hard. So what do we do? Skip it all?
The education system seems to be imploding. From the Sheffield University students who will be spared essay writing and exam questions they find “distressing” to the “incredibly burdensome” school reports teachers are demanding be replaced by something more “brief ” and “general”; the calls to shut down church schools after “fears of indoctrination” to the “huge rise in child referrals” by teachers to the NHS’S specialist gender change service, the whole system is buckling. Which wouldn’t be funny if the forces it’s buckling beneath weren’t the lightest of lightweights: the edu-flakes.
Add to this edu-flake cluster the constant grumblings of parents about “too much homework” and the one in five now getting extra time in exams – and we have ourselves a problem.
Shall we just call the whole thing off? Do away with an outmoded education system that cannot possibly function if the virtue-signalling siege continues (and one fears it will only get worse)? We could replace schools and universities with communes where children, parents and teachers, sustained by a long line of ethical food trucks, can languish in vast goat milk Jacuzzis as various key things like breathing techniques, the art of the four-handed massage and “how to tweet” are imparted by some nonthreatening form of osmosis.
There is, it’s true, something terrifyingly totalitarian about the traditional teaching model. To have one supposedly superior person standing there before a whole class of fiercely individual four-year-olds too busy battling their own sexual identity crises to focus on anything as mundane as their ABCS? You can’t do that. And you can’t tell our flimsy young anything as a fact either. It’s upsetting and it’s intrusive. Because what if they disagree on a fundamental level with sentence structure? What if they have an ethical problem with Pythagoras’ theorem? That bullying hypotenuse could act as a trigger. And telling pupils Pythagoras was a vegetarian who didn’t eat beans either because he thought they looked like little people might not be enough to calm them down.
Thankfully, no one will understand what totalitarianism is, since it can no longer be taught. It may not have a capital letter, which makes it easier for
students like those at Leeds Trinity University to bear, but alongside the “no caps” rule in the now infamous memo issued last week, Leeds lecturers were told to avoid anything that might “frighten the students into failure”. And as staff at another leading university, Sheffield, have just been warned, students should also no longer be confronted with “distressing” material that focuses on or around any of the following sensitive issues: race, gender, identity, politics, incest, HIV/AIDS, faith, religion, sexuality, paedophilia, mental health, drugs, alcohol, abortion, rape, suicide, disability, domestic and sexual violence, torture, death and bereavement.
That the same delicate students who now have the right to skip essays and exam questions on these “upsetting” topics will instead go home and watch their beloved Game of Thrones, where one man is having an incestuous relationship with his sister, and someone else bakes his two sons into a pie and eats them, hasn’t seemed to have occurred to the compiler of this list of things that shall not be named.
It all makes my eye twitch. Can any of this be really happening?
But yes, it is. And right now even enforced post-prandial naps for teachers and students on rainbowstriped beanbags with state-supplied pacifiers for all won’t be enough to calm everyone down. They’ve dug deep to find a long list of words expressing their discontent, you see, and those same words come up day after day. It’s all too “distressing”, “upsetting”, “confusing”, “offensive”, and “traumatising”. But there’s one word you never see, the only honest one out there – and that’s “hard”. Exams aren’t “anxiety-inducing”, they’re hard. World wars and climate change aren’t “upsetting” or “confusing”, they’re desperately hard and tragic truths we need to know about. Homework is hard, growing up is hard, life is hard. So what do we do? Skip it all?
Someone wise, who probably managed to white-knuckle it through school and university years, once said: “Civilisations don’t give out, they give in.” If we’re not careful we’ll manage both.