You Can Give a Boy a Doll, but You Can't Make Him Play With It
To find juicy parts like
One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely 'stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.'
Boy, the left-libertarians are making gains! :P
This is femenism.
Schools aren't about education so much as social engineering, these days.
There was never a reason to abandon scholastic education, it worked perfectly well.
Perhaps too well.
This is a very instructive article and I'm glad you linked it.
It showcases very aptly why (serious) libertarianism and leftism won't get along; a true leftist will never rest until he can mold the world to fit his paradigms. Not even children's playtime is safe from their encroachments. It doesn't matter that their "gender = 100% environment" theory doesn't hold to even superficial scrutiny, they're in love with the idea and they'll pursue it no matter what.
Notice also how "exclusion" is apparently a bad thing in and of itself. Of course, if you were to ask them if we should also include rapists and Nazis, they'd quickly concoct some rationalization.
Steven Pinker eats these kind of hyper-egalitarians for breakfast:
Clayton -
Ironically, the tale of the crocodile and two giraffes is extremely sexist - the bad female abandoned her children, but the good males saved them.
@ Andris
LOL
The atoms tell the atoms so, for I never was or will but atoms forevermore be.
Yours sincerely,
Physiocrat
What frustrates me about stories like this is that I don't understand what wrongs this effort is intended to right?
Say the notion of gender difference is something we imprint on children from infancy, an artificial thing passed from generation to generation so unwittingly we barely know how to ask "is it real?"
So what. Is this any different from any other socially constructed taken-for-granted truth? Either it has its roots in some evolutionary development that was a strength to the species, or it's an aesthetic choice that literally every human population makes. Either way, it's not good or bad. It just is. Like the novel form or the kleenex-an invention that serves a purpose. If it didn't, it wouldn't continue to exist.
People like this fail to give each other the credit to believe they will make of their lives what they will. They believe nurture determines 100% of the final adult, that this person will never have the self-determination to understand their deepest desires for themselves or carry it out if understood. It disgusts me that a bunch of teachers of all people-teachers! can have so little belief in the strength of the human spirit. If they think this way at all, why do they even prize that inner identity? Why do they care about it?
I see this as misguided efforts to eliminate hurtful things done to people based on gender. They see gender as the problem, rather than the people doing the hurtful things. It seems similar to seeing racism and wanting to genetically alter humanity to have uniform skin color, since clearly that is the cause of racism </sarcasm>.
I don't realy have a problem with certain aspects of society becoming gender neutral and I think some things may be based in silly traditions that have never realy been given much thought. But i think everyone should try and be weary of using government to force gender neutrality on the population. If a toy shop or clothes shop would like to remove the girls and boys sections and combine clothes and toys all over the place then they should be free to do that. But so called cultural programming aside, there may be a very good business reason to divide products up based on gender.
It will be interesting to see the results of this movement towards gender neutrality.
Will it lead to more cases of individuals identifying themselves as homosexuals? I think this is defnitely a likely outcome of a gender neutrality movement. But I think that would depend on how far or how extreme the movement takes it.
Will it lead to more girls engaging in traditionally male activities? Most tradtionally male activities are already performed by females. Also male activities are more likely to be gender neutral than female activities. But even if we did have more females engaging in tradionally male activities I would not have a problem with that but I personally would not encourage it.