It’s time ‘snowflakes’ had an uncomfortable lesson

Last week, I didn’t know who Sir Michael Barber was; today, I’m thinking of leaving my husband for him. Why? Because every word the educationist wrote in his short but ground-breaking piece published in the Times Higher

Education magazine on Thursday is genius. Because the gratitude one feels when someone in his position finally has the guts to say what you’ve been dying to hear is enough to leave you lightheaded. And because right now the chairman of the new Office For Students may just be the bravest man in Britain.

The headline – “Universities must be places of intellectual discomfort” – was enough to prompt a double take. Discomfort? I thought we were done with that word. I thought the very notion had been rejected by the snowflake generation who – anxious to avoid even the most fleeting sense of unease around education, work, food, sex or relationships – had insisted the world be made into a giant padded playpen, like the one I used to put my baby daughter in when hard edges were my number one fear.

Barber – a global expert on implementation of large-scale system change and authority on educational reform – is imploring the universities who have been restricting free speech by clamping down on ideas, literature, guest speakers and behaviour that are not in keeping with snowflake values, not to be afraid of those hard edges.

“To avoid discomfort,” he writes, “is to retreat from freedom of speech.”

Like a crouching, open-armed parent coaxing his hesitant, newly mobile toddler to walk towards him (“Come on… you can do it! Yes, you can!”), he’s telling both the Snowflakes and the deferential elders in charge of their education that much of the most profound learning requires discomfort, and that “‘comfortable’ is the start of a slippery slope towards ‘complacent’ or ‘self-satisfied’”. The problem is that despite their advancing years (defined as those born between 1981 and 1997, millennials are now between 20 and 36 years old), snowflakes are still unsteady on their feet. And that slippery slope Sir Michael talks of? Well, they’re already lying en masse at the foot of it. Not that this makes the Office For Students’ defiant decision to adopt “the widest possible definition of freedom of speech: namely anything within the law” any less important, and when Sir Michael says in his piece that if the OFS is forced to, “it will be to widen freedom of speech rather than restrict it”, I can actually feel my pupils becoming heart-shaped.

Yes, these delicate souls may have missed out on hearing the likes of Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell speak (on grounds of their supposed transphobia), reading about the “melting transports” of Fanny Hill (dropped from university courses “for fear of offending students”), Shakespeare’s

King Lear (too much “violence against women”), and even a handful of contemporary texts featuring general unpleasantness, such as Emma Donoghue’s Room.

Yes, they will have been spared the gnarlier periods of history. The 11th-century Crusades – where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem

– is tricky for obvious reasons, as is the Holocaust – for fear of confronting anti-semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils – although any historical event that makes a good vehicle for promoting political correctness will, of course, be exhaustively covered. But if we work together we can bring discomfort back into millennials’ lives. I, for one, would really like to help with that.

But how to begin? By explaining that “discomfort” isn’t about being trolled on Instagram or having your knee brushed under the table, but being in the trenches? Assuring snowflakes that the answer to the terrible anxiety they feel about their physical appearance (reported, alongside their liberal use of antidepressants, to be the reason the demographic don’t much enjoy sex) is to stop looking at yourself in the mirror – or indeed taking selfies? We’d definitely have to ditch egalitarianism and bring back the deeply uncomfortable notion that some people are just better at some things than others, that third place isn’t good enough, and that in life there are winners and losers.

Then all that’s left is to impose on them a strict reading list of the most disturbing books ever written. Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy, Guts by Chuck Palahniuk, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, the Bible and Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine by Yang Jisheng, (in which an account of the cannibalism induced by Mao Tse-tung’s Great Leap Forward might make posters of the man slightly less appealing) are just a few ideas.

In essence – and I may be paraphrasing Sir Michael here but I hope he won’t mind – I say we make millennials live through the real-life equivalent of the TV game show Total Wipeout, in which contestants are forced to complete extreme obstacle and assault courses involving zip wires, toppling towers and mud baths and when they emerge, bruised and battered, dripping wet and scarcely able to speak, we ask them whether they have truly embraced the idea of discomfort yet.

Anyone who says “no” goes again. Those who say “yes” are granted a full and rewarding life of the kind Sir Michael is advocating.

‘Discomfort’ isn’t about being trolled on Instagram or having your knee brushed