Study War No More: Trigger Warnings and Guns in the Classroom (original) (raw)

International Handbook of Philosophy of Education, 2018

Abstract

The phrase ‘trigger warnings’ has been used in university discourse to refer to prefatory comments from instructors, warning students that texts and/or classroom discussions may be disturbing to some students. Ironically, trigger warnings are also offered to professors in classrooms where guns may be present. Both kinds of trigger have been viewed by some as at odds with free speech, and by others as necessary for genuinely free speech to prevail. In this chapter, we argue that the metaphor of ‘triggers’, like material guns, has no place in the classroom. Pedagogical prefaces are legitimate, we are, but calling them ‘trigger warnings’ is a mistake. This chapter draws on Richard Rorty, John Dewey, and George Lakoff to argue that because the language we use has material consequences, democracy demands that instructors adopt new metaphors to describe the kinds of arguments that make classrooms places in which education can happen.

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