"Triggered by Old Books" is the Lead Paint Issue from Lazy and Affirmative Action Students

Why have Liberal Arts in College At All? Are real, classic Liberal Arts are to be dumped in the trash heap for being "Triggers"? The reason the classics were taught is because they were the original, they have depth and meaning and reflect the same human condition and thought from millennia. They are not easy and require mental ability.

It is bogus to disregard the true classics. But now, student's are too lazy to read and understand them (forget about in Latin or Greek as they were taught less than a Century ago), or they do not have the academic aptitude. The saddest part is, the students are getting away with this scam.

This is as bogus an issue as blaming lead based paint for low IQs in minorities. Lead paint had been part of life for centuries, but when minority children, in general, continued to show lower scores for academics, the real answer that they were not quite as bright became the bogey-man, and the bogus "excuse" of minority children's eating lead paint chips was to blame.

How may tons of lead paint chips are we to eat for us to really believe this nonsense?  m/r

Columbia Students Triggered by Old Books Are the Ones Who Need Them Most | National Review Online

by IAN TUTTLE May 29, 2015 

In 8 a.d., Ovid, the poet, the toast of Rome, was suddenly exiled to the remote outpost of Tomis. The reason remains a mystery. Ovid himself said only that his fate was caused by carmen et error — “a poem and a mistake.” 

Two millennia later, a new effort to exile Ovid — not from Rome, but from Columbia University’s famed Core Curriculum — could be attributed to the same: carmen et error, where the poem is his Metamorphoses, and the error is that “like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.” So wrote four undergraduate students earlier this month in Columbia’s campus newspaper, the Spectator. They would like a “trigger warning” affixed to Ovid’s masterwork. 

It is safe to say that these students (all members of Columbia’s “Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board,” by the by) overreached. Critics have been many and swift and savage. In her weekly Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan pardoned the students on the grounds that “everyone in their 20s has the right to be an idiot.”

But idiocy is notoriously infectious, and it is not obvious that the obvious rebuttals will suffice. For instance, critics have posed the natural reductio question, namely: If Ovid merits a “trigger warning,” doesn’t Shakespeare? Milton? Chaucer? The Bible? (Yes, yes, yes, and it doesn’t have one already?) But appealing to the power of Great Names — Shakespeare! — or repairing to mockery are sufficient responses only as long as a Great Name has the power to inspire awe, or mockery to inspire shame.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419025/columbia-students-triggered-old-books-are-ones-who-need-them-most-ian-tuttle