To be or not to be forewarned is the question troubling dons teaching the classics of English literature to today’s snowflake students, as the Open University attaches trigger warnings to a host of classical English texts, including Hamlet. The Mail on Sunday has more.
Undergraduates are informed that reading William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Jane Austen’s Persuasion may trigger feelings of ‘distress’ and ‘trauma’.
Critics branded the warnings the “height of stupidity” and claimed that students could be deterred from discovering some of the world’s literary treasures.
Only Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice avoids the Open University’s trigger-warning list, obtained by the Mail on Sunday after a Freedom of Information request.
It states: “Apart from Austen’s Pride And Prejudice, the other set texts contain some material (including depictions of violence, assault or self-harm) that some students might find distressing.” Other works carrying warnings include the Shakespeare plays Julius Caesar and As You Like It, the Arabian Nights collection of stories and plays by French writer Moliere.
A briefing note for tutors states: “It is impossible to know how or why some students react negatively to potentially distressing content, as material that might be innocuous to some students might trigger traumatic memories in others, and vice versa.”
Fearful course students are also directed to a university-produced podcast “dealing with distressing content”, which features an imaginary scholar quizzing a senior tutor about potentially problematic works of literature. The university has three categories of warnings covering more than 30 topics likely to provoke “unwelcome emotions, memories and mental health issues”. These include suicide, self-harm, child abuse, racism, colonialism, divorce and common phobias such as needles, blood and spiders.
Worth reading in full.
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The youth of today seem more troubled than those of the past despite all the safeguards put in place for them.
Our should that read “because of all the safeguards”?
Moronphobia!!
Nice to see some new names popping up in the comments.
Tell your friends!
Cracking name
Try telling them to read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Less trigger, more atom bomb.
Get rid of these people and their patronising ways, pandering to the worst sides of human nature.
BE TOUGH – BECAUSE LIFE IS!
The only things that need trigger warnings are the bloody trigger warnings.
I suggest to discontinue the use of terms like snowflakes for the victims of all these intellecutal safety procedures, namely, the students, who have no way of opting out of them and keep being told/ taught that this would be necessary by people who are at least as clever as the majority of students and have much more real-world experience. This is obviously outrageous nonsense but it’s really just university administration health and safety teams on autopilot. Their job is to attach trigger warnings to stuff and given enough time (and money for salaries) they’ll eventually have all of the world covered with them.
Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and Orwell’s ‘1984’ must have left the syllabus long ago.
More bombardment of inconsequential woke rubbish to distract us.
Meanwhile, the ruling elites work in the background on the stuff that really matters.
I just wonder how many of these snowflakes play/ed violent games on line or watched violent movies?
Trigger warnings will be attached to these in due course. That’s just a matter of busy people finally getting around to that.