I remember how it was -- JR
Is this a case of crazy wokery I see before me? Actors ridicule university trigger warnings over blood in Macbeth
It is Shakespeare's most violent play – a bloody saga packed with stabbing, strangling and poisoning that reaches a grisly climax with a beheading.
And for more than 400 years audiences have been enthralled – if a little disturbed – by the butchery of Macbeth.
But now one of the UK's top universities stands accused of 'infantilising' students after it warned them they might be 'offended' by the 'bloodshed' in the play.
Queen's University Belfast has issued the warning to undergraduates studying a module called Further Adventures in Shakespeare on its BA English course.
'You are advised that this play could cause offence as it references and / or deals with issues and depictions relating to bloodshed,' the warning, a copy of which has been obtained by this newspaper under Freedom of Information laws, states.
The university has also applied similar warnings to the Bard's Richard III, Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus.
Some of Britain's biggest theatrical stars last night branded the warnings counterproductive and unnecessary. They point out that Macbeth, which was first performed in 1606, is particularly popular with schoolchildren.
Sir Ian McKellen, who starred opposite Dame Judi Dench in Sir Trevor Nunn's landmark 1976 RSC production, said warnings such as this could undermine the dramatic impact of the piece.
He said: 'My sister (a teacher) used to show Sir Trevor Nunn's TV version of the 1976 Macbeth to her teenage students.
'She'd pull down the blinds, start the video and then leave the classroom and count the minutes till she heard the first scream from within. Had the youngsters had trigger warnings in advance, the effect of the play would have been considerably diminished.'
He added: 'I remember talking to a priest who saw a number of performances of the stage production at the Stratford Other Place.
'He would hold out his crucifix throughout the performance, to protect the audience from the devilry conjured by the cast. I suppose these triggers are something similar.'
Call The Midwife star Jenny Agutter, who has acted in Shakespeare's The Tempest, King Lear and Love's Labour's Lost, said: 'I don't understand why anyone should feel warnings are necessary for Shakespeare's plays. Unless we need to be constantly warned that depicting human nature might cause offence.'
Sir Richard Eyre, the former Director of the National Theatre who has directed productions of Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear, said: 'It's completely fatuous and totalitarian to try to police people's minds with these absurd warnings. Ridiculous, contemptible, infantilising.
Presumably the people putting out the trigger warnings feel they are able to cope with the content of these plays, but weaker, younger, less intelligent people aren't.' Doctor Who star David Tennant and The Good Wife actress Cush Jumbo are due to star in a new production of Macbeth which opens in London in December. It is one of four major productions of the play set to open in the UK.
Queen's Belfast's trigger warning for Twelfth Night centres on what it calls the 'depictions relating to sexuality or gender. Warnings for Richard III and Titus Andronicus relate to depictions of disability in the former and 'race and or racism' in the latter. A spokesperson for Queen's University Belfast declined to comment.
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The Sad State of Civics Education
In the waning days of our collective ChiCom Virus psychosis, we looked forward to sending our kids back to the classroom, where (we hoped) they would once again get a solid education in the fundamentals.
To our dismay, we found exactly the opposite.
Last fall, the National Assessment of Education Standards was administered to 13-year-olds across the country, testing students’ proficiency in math and reading. The results of “the nation’s report card” were abysmal. “The 13-year-olds scored an average of 256 out of 500 in reading, and 271 out of 500 in math,” reports The New York Times, “down from average scores of 260 in reading and 280 in math three years ago.”
But at least the pandemic was an equal-opportunity destroyer. The Times adds: “Achievement declined across lines of race, class and geography. But in math, especially, vulnerable children — including Black, Native American and low-income students — experienced bigger drops.”
Now, so-called education experts are scratching their heads without seeing the obvious — like, oh, the fact that many schools locked kids away for two years without any social interaction. As political analyst Ed Morrissey writes, “That certainly would explain why economically disadvantaged children suffered more of a drop-off, since they would be more at risk for learning loss in a remote environment — and some might not have had ongoing access to remote education at all.”
But that’s not all. The NAES found that scores had been falling long before the coronavirus. Morrissey adds: “The post-pandemic part of the plunge proves that not only did we get no benefit from those policies, we did real damage to the cognitive development of our children, and almost certainly their social and psychological health as well. The fact that scores had been falling previous to the pandemic does not negate that conclusion at all — it proves that our pandemic policies made an already-bad situation worse.”
If educators and politicians are looking for answers, they needn’t look very far. For example, California’s Mathematics Curriculum Framework seeks to replace rigor in mathematics education with cultural Marxist teachings in environmental and social justice. No kidding. Teachers there are instructed to teach “socio-political consciousness” instead of algebra — which, if you live in Cali, explains why your kids might not be able to solve a basic equation, write a complete sentence, or explain the difference between the executive and the judicial branches. But when it comes to political activism, they’re ready to take to the streets for Black Lives Matter, Greenpeace, or Pride Month.
For the sane opposition, here are Williamson Evers and Ze'ev Wurman from the Independent Institute: “A real champion of equity and justice would want all California’s children to learn actual math — as in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus — not an endless river of new pedagogical fads that effectively distort and displace actual math.”
Unfortunately, the Left’s union-driven education agenda affects subjects across the board, including civics. As for the NAEP, “Just 13% of eighth graders met the proficiency standard for history,” Fox News reports. “Barely 20% met the standard for civics. According to the 2022 Annenberg Civics Knowledge Survey, less than half of Americans could name all three branches of government; less than 25% could identify the freedom of religion as guaranteed by the Constitution.”
And we wonder why these children grow up to vote Democrat. Even the paucity of civics education they do receive is becoming increasingly politicized.
“Teachers have rewritten their job description,” argues Bethany Mandel at The Spectator. “Out: civics basics. In: indoctrination. They believe that their mandate isn’t to teach history or civics, but instead, to brainwash children; and lo and behold, just a few years later, children are falling ever further behind in competence in this newly hyperpoliticized subject area.”
All this makes one wonder whether our kids might’ve been better off staying at home post-COVID. At least at home they’d avoid that steady diet of anti-American propaganda and Marxist indoctrination.
Former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers thinks some form of national service might unite the country again. And we get it. Serving others is never a bad approach, and it might help build character and unity among those who join in. But national service still leaves our kids without a solid education in the three R’s or even a basic grasp of civics.
We have years, perhaps decades, to fight and win this war. The good news is that a national movement is underway. Thanks to COVID-19, we finally got to see the true colors of the teachers unions. (Imagine that. They’re commie red.) And parents, students, educators, and political leaders are finally fed up with our schools serving as Marxist boot camps.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/98308?mailing_id=7579
*******************************************Reading and Math Scores Plummet as Racial and Sexual Activism Replace Academics
As America’s public education system reports the worst literacy and math performance in decades, its schools dedicate increasingly immense portions of their time to lessons on the supposed virtues of racial and gender segregation.
With only eight hours per day and 180 school days per year, one would think that everyone from the newest teacher’s aide to the tenured administrators would call “all hands on deck” to spend every moment trying to close the enormous performance gaps inflamed by COVID-19 lockdowns.
Instead of utilizing data-proven methods to close gaps in literacy and math, like many private and microschools do, most public schools have centered on a different tactic: political distraction.
As parents around the country began demanding answers for the lack of results from those they entrusted their children to, schools began presenting scapegoats to deflect the culpability in the mess they helped to make.
Teachers unions, school “equity officers,” and administrators began proclaiming that historic racial inequities were responsible for the massive gaps in black and Hispanic students’ reading scores. They claim “white supremacy” is responsible for students’ disengagement—that “students of color” would learn far more if they were “allowed” to read books by black authors under black teachers.
This is, of course, highly misleading. Students respond more to the quality of the text and the educator than to the race of the teacher. The “racial inequities” claim also ignores that the highest-performing demographic, Asian students, aren’t reading books by predominantly Asian authors and studying under Asian teachers.
Nevertheless, major metropolitan districts have doubled down on the need for a focus on racially-driven education—often implementing the tenets of critical race theory and citing its so-called scholars.
Indianapolis Public Schools and its over 30,000 students languish in illiteracy, but you won’t hear superintendent Aleesia Johnson apologize for a lack of results. Instead, she flocks to media outlets to praise the school’s third gallant push towards “racial equity” (because apparently, the first two didn’t succeed).
Instead of hosting emergency training sessions to bring Indianapolis teachers up to speed on proven reading instruction pedagogy, Indianapolis brought critical race theory scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings in for an emergency “all staff required” session on racial equity. One Indianapolis middle school required students to attend so-called racial equity sessions in which Black Lives Matter activists told them that crime was a “made up” term by “the white people.”
In undercover interviews with several Indiana schools, Accuracy in Media captured several administrators admitting to consistently wasting reading instruction time with racially segregationist activism—even if they had to hide it from parents.
In 2021, Chicago Public Schools boasted only a 17% literacy rate for Hispanic students and an 11% literacy rate for black students. Rather than assist black and Hispanic students in improving the single greatest factor in adult success, Chicago launched another racial equity initiative and hired additional “Office of Equity” staff.
While racial equity is most often the distraction touted by inner-city metropolitan schools—from New York City and Washington, D.C., on the East Coast to Los Angeles and Seattle on the West Coast—the suburban school districts surrounding them usually tout LGBTQ activism as a school focus.
Several California suburban public school districts reported abysmal reading and math performances in 2022 but have spent little time attempting to provide remediation since. Instead, these California districts threw their time and resources into celebrating LGBTQ activism.
Hollywood and Glendale schools chose to implement curriculum on the history of “LGBTQ+ activists” in place of additional reading and math instruction. Hispanic and Armenian parents flocked to school board meetings to protest what many called “a waste of time.”
“Why can’t you just focus on teaching our children to read?” a parent of elementary school children asked the Glendale Unified board.
The grassroots advocacy organization Parents Defending Education cites dozens of suburban school districts in over 40 states that have launched LGBTQ initiatives in the last five years, with district after district replacing an academic focus with hour after hour of learning about racial and sexual activism.
The British newspaper the Daily Mail gained access to a private online meeting of a group of midwestern public school teachers discussing ways to spend time encouraging students to engage with LGBTQ activism and to consider “transitioning” kids (calling them by different names and pronouns and letting them dress as members of the opposite sex) during the school day without telling their parents—even in the face of recently passed laws forbidding sexually explicit discussions with students in class.
Florida—which has enacted legislation to forbid racial and sexual activism in the classroom—along with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to keep public schools open during the COVID-19 pandemic, has shown greater reading and math score improvement than any other state in the country.
Education reform advocates for years have been touting the positive data regarding keeping schools open during the pandemic and keeping the focus on academics. Consistent reports from Corey DeAngelis of the American Federation for Children, Robert Pondiscio and Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute, and Jason Bedrick and Lindsey Burke of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy prove what common sense suggests: Students who focus on reading and writing in the classroom fare better than those who don’t. (The Daily Signal is the multimedia news and commentary outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
While The New York Times may suggest it’s “breaking news” for math and reading scores among 14-year-olds to be the “lowest levels in decades, with a sharp drop since the pandemic began,” it really isn’t news—and it’s not breaking.
When a school wastes eight hours a day on political activism instead of academic instruction, literacy and math competency don’t improve. Political activism isn’t preparing students for the challenges of their future career and for adulthood, and public schools’ attempts to convince parents that it does are losing their luster.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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