University Students Given Trigger Warnings About Shakespeare – In England
“to help students who may be upset if a text reminds them of a personal traumatic experience”
This is so pathetic. If you need trigger warnings for Shakespeare, you belong in a rubber room, not a college classroom.
The Independent UK reports:
Cambridge University students given trigger warnings for Shakespeare plays
Academics have criticised “trigger warnings” after Cambridge University students were warned about “potentially distressing topics” in plays by Shakespeare.
English literature undergraduates were apparently cautioned that a lecture focusing on Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors would include “discussions of sexual violence” and “sexual assault”.
According to The Telegraph, the trigger warnings were posted in the English Faculty’s ‘Notes on Lectures’ document which is circulated to students at the university.
Academics have expressed concern that colleges trying to protect young adults from certain issues may render them incapable of dealing with real life when they graduate.
Supporters of trigger warnings say they serve to help students who may be upset if a text reminds them of a personal traumatic experience.
However critics such as Mary Beard, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, say allowing students to avoid learning about traumatic episodes of history and literature is “fundamentally dishonest”.
Beard said previously: “We have to encourage students to be able to face that, even when they find they’re awkward and difficult for all kinds of good reasons.”
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Comments
I find it hard to believe that there are college students who 1) are reading actual Shakespeare, and not a “Classic Comics” edition and 2) really understand Elizabethan English enough to be “triggered” by what they’re reading.
The SJWs do protest too much, methinks.
As Starveling says in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (III.i): “I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done.”
Why didn’t they read Shakespeare 9th-11th grade like the rest of us?
Back in the Stone Age my school district had us reading him starting in the 7th Grade. My entire class managed to understand 90% of it without problem, although we had occasional need of a good dictionary! Beautiful, flowing language, but archaic (haut boys?) and even familiar words didn’t always make sense, as the meanings of words have changed over time. In other words, reading the Bard made us think … and thinking is anathema in today’s schools!
“A [thinking man], a [thinking man]! My kingdom for a [thinking man]!”