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It really makes you wonder what we are coming to when this pops up in the news,
"Students at Oxford University in England are allowed to skip lectures about crimes they find 'Potentially Disturbing'.
Makes sense, except, they are criminal law students.
Nice to see this is happening in the UK as well as the USA. Unbelievable !
Karen
Comments
I wonder
I wonder if they allow medical students to skip watching procedures they find "potentially icky?"
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Nah,
they either throw up or faint or both.
Angharad
Total Knee Replacement Ickiness.
When my X was in Medical School, she came home one time and said they had viewed a Total Knee Replacement Surgery. (About 1970) She said that several of the students in the theatre fainted and she said that it was the most awful surgery she'd ever witnessed.
Gwen
With regard the law students
it isn't so much unbelievable as criminal.
Angharad
The good ones
I want the peace officers who can stomach the disturbing crimes because the bad guys certainly will not be repulsed. The same thing goes for my doctors. Do you really want a doctor who cannot stomach the procedures?
Challenges in Life
In an attempt to avoid offending anyone, we are systematically removing the challenges that help us to grow as human beings. Life is supposed to be hard. There is no such thing as an even playing field. Some people have talents that others do not. Without mountains to climb, we become stagnant.
We do have a moral responsibility to try to make life fair for people. It just seems that we have substituted the word easy for fair.
waif
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.
The cotton wool effect
It seems that the totally risk averse society we are heading towards want everyone to be wrapped in cotton wool for the whole of their lives. Sadly the big bad world out there is no respector of cotton wool wrapped people.
Cut you finger and people will say, 'who can we sue?'. etc etc.
The only winners will be the lawyers.
People will grow up with no bad experiences to shape them. That can't bode well for the future.
That's not real life.
Thing about real life,
It doesn't care if you are ready or not. It is all too real.
It is almost Darwinist.
TANSTAAFL
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Dixi
level playing field
Having a level playing field simply means that everyone has an equal opportunity to fail. So only the strong, who persevere and are willing to try again if necessary are winners.
To bad so few people are willing to take risks and will only "compete" if they are assured there will be no losers. I ask you, if there are no losers, how can there be winners?
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Cite, please?
Do you have a source for this?
This sounds an awful lot like some right-wing commentator's distortion of how "content warnings" work in academia.
My guess is that, like with the McDonalds coffee suit, the full story will look an awful lot different from the way the story is told over the back fence (or via social media.)
Rather like the "bathroom predators" stories, actually.
Seems Like Someone's Just Playing Safe
http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/oxford-university-...
The usual sensationalism
Kind of what I figured.
Allowing for the usual media distortions, it looks like a fairly standard "trigger warning" situation. Students are advised ahead of time if there is potentially triggering material, and they then decide how to prepare themselves for it. Skipping the lecture is an option, as it is for any course, for any reason (such as having spent too much time drinking the night before), but the students are still responsible for the material for exams (or projects or whatever.)
I don't know how different the UK law schools are from the USA; in the USA, there are not only exams to worry about, but thinks like mock trials, etc., and in any case, it's the bar exams that decide whether you become a lawyer.
The pushback to trigger warnings seems to mostly coming from academics who resent having anyone question their absolute authority to do as they like in their classes. I've had a few on-line disagreements with some of them, and they mostly seem to be defending their right to be a*******s.
Independent uses MailOnLine as source!
So the source is really the Mail On Line. Look at what was really said by the university:
A University of Oxford spokesperson, though, said the institution had not adopted a formal policy on trigger warnings.
In a statement, the spokesperson added: “The university aims to encourage independent and critical thinking and does not, as a rule, seek to protect students from ideas or material they may find uncomfortable.
Story came from Mike Pingree
Story came from Mike Pingree's 'Looking Glass' published in the Sunday edition ( 5/15/16) Boston Herald
Karen
tanstaafl
Time Enough for Love heinlein pub 1973
ed
I have all his books - or most, anyway
I started reading them in the 1950s. I still pick them up and read them over and over.
Portia
Heinlein
If he were still around I think he would fit right in on this site!
Me too
He is missed.
It seems modern technology & policy
is making us more squeamish and less able to deal with the world, which while beautiful is also dirty and dangerous. I don't claim to be the world's best driver, probably closer to the worst one, but with cars that park themselves and even driverless ones, aren't we deskilling ourselves? At least half the drivers I see can't park a car properly, so you wonder what they're like at speeds above four miles an hour. I'll bet that cars with self parking or driverless ones won't stop them parking in stupid places like junctions, even though the parking may be neater,
We live in a world where people would rather text each other than speak face to face and where they rely on their phones or tablets to know everything - what happened to general knowledge? Why do we bother educating them, just give them an iPhone and tell them to get to work, their phone will tell them how do everything from brain surgery to flying a jumbo.
Perhaps my age is showing and I'm just a luddite but I suspect people are becoming less caring except for the relationship with their technology.
Angharad