I have always been impressed by the inventiveness of the young when lying. Our 8 year old granddaughter demonstrated a surprising sophistication when slightly late in returning home. I suggested excuses:
“we could say there was a sinkhole in the road which was vast and several cars had already fallen down it – the screams of the people down there were blood curdling”. She shook her head. “too much stuff grandpa let’s just say there was a big hole in the road that meant we had to take a long way back…” She has all the makings of a Tory politician, that girl.
I remember one chap who realised that dog had had its day and said “our parrot shredded my homework…” He was shredded himself for that.
But nowadays we are protecting our young from books that might cause them stress. A number of Universities have triggered “beware” notices on or banned several books and plays. Amongst others “A Midsummer night’s Dream” – for classism; Strindberg’s most famous play “Miss Julie” – contains discussions on suicide; works of Jane Austen, Chaucer, Charles Dickens and several others.
To return to our inventive young, we are handing them the ammunition to avoid work.
“I couldn’t read King Lear…ageist, violent and sad”
“I’m not doing any more maths as a professor in New York said ‘the equation 2+2=4 reeks of white supremacist patriarchy’.”
“I can’t do history as I’ve read the old historians we’re asked to read were narrow-minded white men who delighted to write about other white men”
“The Fairie Queen is potentially homophobic – I can’t read that.”
“Oliver Twist is about pederasty, criminality and violence towards women – why was it published?”
The continued decline this year in the number of young people taking English Literature ’A’ Level and the removal of it from some University syllabuses should allay concerns we have about the stress-inducing literature.
I read English at Oxford and if I’d had access to this branch of stress-sourcing I’d have slammed the ghastly Beowulf straight on to that list of “banned texts”. Why? Animal abuse, misogyny, classism and more. Indeed I’d have led a crusade against anything Anglo Saxon on the basis that this was a beastly, cruel period study of which should be avoided. Like Covid it should be locked down.
Yet those providing the reference points for such censorship of literature and other subjects like Latin (“Latin is a dead language – studying it equates to necrophilia”) come from a bunch of radical thinking post-graduate Tutors who have created the anti-establishment wokeism that can infuriate or divert.
For me increasingly it is diverting but it suggests the study of the humanities at University may be becoming increasingly controversial and expendable. The very idea of a University education being essential has been contradicted by the legacy of punitive debts such an education creates.
Yet, as you’ll previously have gathered, my view about today’s youth or indeed youth at any point of history is that they were/are in general optimistic, good humoured and enterprising.
Three tiny lavatorial examples of this:
Years ago before Oxford Colleges were unisex a woman’s college installed a urinal for visiting men. Above it a woman had written.
“Who is Armitage and what is shanking?”
In an American college someone had inscribed over a washbasin “Think.” Sometime later someone added an arrow from “think” to where soap was dispensed and it said “Thoap.”
Finally In a pub urinal the immortal “The penis mightier than the sword”
So long as we encourage such laughter, irreverence and freedom of speech all will be OK.
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