JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: How long before our classrooms are full of children miaowing, roaring, hissing and chirping like birds? Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport By Jonathan Brocklebank For The Scottish Daily Mail Published: 20:57 BST, 19 September 2024 | Updated: 20:57 BST, 19 September 2024 e-mail View comments Some years before I was born, Peter Cook wrote one of the best known and funniest sketches of all time. It concerned a one-legged man, played by Dudley Moore, auditioning for the role of Tarzan. Beautifully crafted, part of its humour lay in the gentle but painstaking logic deployed by the auditioner to suggest to the candidate that he may not be ideal for the part.
It was also absurd in the extreme – therefore hilarious – to imagine that a ‘unidexter’ was sufficiently deluded to suppose the audition might work out for him. The late Cook described it as one of the most perfect sketches he had acted in. I concur, but I have lived to see things he hasn’t.
I’ve lived to see comedy such as this sourly characterised as ‘ableist’. It is now no longer impossible to imagine a casting director giving serious thought to offering the Tarzan role to a one-legged man – or even woman. Howling mad as it emerged a secondary pupil in Scotland identifies as wolf and is supported by school staff The pupil suffers from 'species dysphoria' and identifies as a wolf It would be seen as ‘brave’, ‘empowering’, ‘game-changing’.
In the days which Cook never lived to see, the objective reality of who or what a person is has become increasingly irrelevant. It is what they identify as that counts. In a secondary school somewhere in Scotland a school pupil has opted to identify as a wolf.
Teachers are allowing the child to do it. Your first reaction may be to guffaw. The local authority which has sanctioned this special treatment would prefer you didn’t.
You may see as plain as the nose on your face that, for the role of a wolf, the child is deficient in multiple anatomical departments traditionally associated with the canis lupus subspecies. To highlight these deficiencies in our post-absurd age would be beside the point. Cruel even.
The kid identifies as a wolf. End of. The youngster is said to suffer from ‘species dysphoria’ – a condition (which may or may not exist) whereby a person feels they have been born into the wrong animal form.
Other examples of it – which you must resist the temptation to view as children pulling our chains – are kids identifying as cats, snakes, birds and even dinosaurs. Feasibly, in this council area, which the Daily Mail is not naming, classrooms could become menageries of miaowing, hissing, chirping and roaring beasts – all encouraged by their credulous teachers to be their true selves. How did we get here? Where are we going with this? We have been steadily loosening the shackles of logic at least since the turn of the century, probably longer.
It was around the year 2000 that people started telling me things which were clearly untrue, but remained true for them because they were ‘my truth’. The beauty of ‘my truth’ is you cannot dispute it because it is personal to its owner. An attack on it is an attack on them.
‘My truth’ – a complete nonsense – allowed subjective reality to gain an upper hand on what is demonstrably the case. We see versions of it everywhere – in a former US president whose truth is that the last election was rigged and anyone who disputes it is a fool; in a Scottish rapist who, on being apprehended, decides his truth is that he is a woman who must be held in a women’s prison. Is this really their truth or a device cynically deployed for idiots to swallow? Don’t make your minds up just yet.
First consider how the use of descriptors such as ‘progressive’ have ushered us along the road to the advent of wolf-kid. This is the term – never far from SNP ministers’ lips – which signals to us that anything it is attached to is a step in the ‘right’ direction. A progressive policy is one which represents morality as a journey from bad to good.
You disagree with one of them? Then, friend, you stand in the way of progress. By applying ‘progressive’ to your woke wheeze of choice, you instantly convince idiots to swallow it. They are tickled by the idea of being higher moral beings than their forebears and cannot conceive that any wrong turn is possible.
Like lemmings they march over the cliff onto the rocks of insanity below. Wolf-kid is a product, too, of the imbecilic role reversal which has taken place in Scottish education over the last decade. Suddenly the young are the visionaries, the ones who ‘get it’, and their bumbling educators the ones who must toe the line.
It is the students who vet the reading matter for their courses and, if their sensibilities are offended by any of it, they boycott it. If trigger warnings – such as an alert that the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Kidnapped may contain descriptions of a kidnap – are not present, department heads are hauled over the coals. In schools, if abusive and violent pupils bring chaos to the classroom, teachers must engage them in restorative conversations and learn how they, as educators, can better accommodate their needs.
In the space of two generations, Scottish schools have morphed from places where teachers too often abused their power into ones where children daily abuse theirs. You think they should be taken in hand? There you go again, opposing progress. One might think that latter day Peter Cooks would have a field day with such material.
They are largely too terrified to touch it or else completely on board with the direction of travel. Ricky Gervais’s woke joke from last year, however, deserves an honourable mention. ‘Bloke goes to the doctor.
“Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I’m a pair of curtains.” And the doctor goes “Well, you are then”.’ Months later, a secondary school pupil in Scotland identifies as a wolf and his teacher goes ‘Well, you are then’.
How bewilderingly rapidly the folly of real life overtakes the fancies of comedy. I have questions. I’m sure we all do.
If species dysphoria is really a thing, can we expect species reassignment to be along shortly? Will it be available on the NHS? What period would the Scottish Government deem appropriate for a young person to live as a wolf before he or she qualified for a wolf recognition certificate? Has consideration been given to the effect that allowing a child to identify as a wolf will have on classmates? There may be those who are afraid of wolves. If a child of mine were sharing a classroom with a pupil who was indulged in this pursuit, I think I’d be in chats with the school head. Is snarling and teeth-baring acceptable behaviour for wolves in a classroom setting? If not, why not? How about howling at the moon? The logical extension of permitting a child to identify as a wild animal is surely to sanction the youngster’s replication of that animal’s characteristics.
Is grandma safe? Can we assume that Little Red Riding Hood is definitely off the approved reading list for the class? Is there any identity the council in question would consider too ridiculous to nurture in a schoolchild? How about if a little boy suggests he was born not only in the wrong animal form but also on the wrong planet? Does he get to be an alien? Just one more question. How are the three Rs going? SNP Share or comment on this article: JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: How long before our classrooms are full of children miaowing, roaring, hissing and chirping like birds? e-mail Add comment.
