The mollycoddled students who fuel campus zealotry
STUDENTS who demand protection from controversial views are the product of a mollycoddled ‘snowflake generation’, the Government’s behaviour tsar has warned.
Tom Bennett said the problem began at school when too many children were protected from the ‘harsher realities of the world’ and then had trouble coping with challenging ideas at university.
Schools should do more to teach children not to feel ‘scared that other people will disagree with them’ and instead encourage discussion and debate, he said. Pupils as young as four should be taught to confront difficult truths in life, including discussing prejudice against gay people. Mr Bennett’s comments come after a number of ‘no-platforming’ incidents, in which students have campaigned to block controversial speakers appearing on campuses over their supposedly ‘offensive’ views.
Last month, it emerged that more than one in five universities – including prestigious Russell Group institutions – had a ‘safe space’ policy, in order to ‘protect’ students from ‘mental harm’ at debates or events. And protesters at Oxford have demanded a statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes be torn down.
Mr Bennett, a teacher from Glasgow and former nightclub manager who advises Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, on classroom behaviour, said he was against no-platforming.
‘If you want to create a healthy community of people who are liberally minded and prone towards compassion and democracy, you need to start encouraging those values quite early on and principally by role modelling,’ he said. ‘Help them go to university, and encourage children not to be scared that other people will disagree with them. [With] generation snowflake, sometimes, there is an element of truth that children are a little bit inoculated perhaps against the harsher realities of the world.
‘And then when they go to university they might then encounter a truth that may overwhelm them. No wonder they are seeking safe spaces, because they can’t handle that truth.’
Speaking at a conference on free speech last week, Mr Bennett said that he had not seen no-platforming in schools, but some teachers were keen to steer clear of difficult topics.
‘We need to help children develop to become more robust and to understand ideas that are contrary to their own by role modelling.’
He said it was ‘irresponsible’ for adults to pretend that offensive views did not exist and instead should ‘create a kind of healthy space – not a safe space – for debate to appear.’
His comments come after the most recent example of ‘no-platforming’ when Nick Lowles, of the Hope not Hate campaign group, said he was blocked from speaking at an event by members of the National Union of Students’ ‘Black Students’ group. They claimed he was Islamaphobic as he had condemned Islamic extremism.