I’ve been following various gender equality trends I guess you can call them with kids. It’s important that my kids identify their own interests independent of biology and I like to see what others are doing to promote this value.
I ran across an article about a preschool in Sweden by the name of Egalia. They take gender neutral to a whole new level. They purposly mix up toys so traditionally male toys are grouped with traditional female toys. They encourage any gender child to pretend anything in role play, including parents. They made up a gender neutral pronoun and have special training for all their staff on how not to engage in gender specific anything.
I see value to a lot of what they are doing, but I think it’s that step to far. We do it in America with culture all the time. Everything needs to be PC and color blind. Instead of embracing our differences and learning their value, we push a warped sense of equality. Differences are ignored and I see that like a sin.
While I like the intent of what this preschool is doing, I think it’s too much.
Lina – you clearly indicate that you dislike the ignorance of difference, and that is certainly the general idea behind “color blindness”, but “political correctness” exists to bring the differences between people to the forefront – bringing awareness to the differences and most importantly what contexts they may bring to a person’s life.
Perhaps using pronouns like “zie” and “hir” are a bit over the top for young kids, especially when the potential harms of gendered pronouns can be mitigated in more direct ways, but mixing toys? Encouraging imaginative play irrespective of gender? Ensuring that children are treated as individuals rather than according to a gender assignment? Nothing wrong with any of that that I can see.
The focus should not be (and generally is not) on androgyny (despite what many folks seem to think it is) but just on the idea that there are no “boy things” and no “girl things” just “things”. And being assigned a specific sex at birth doesn’t mean that you’re “locked in” to some arcane culturally-assigned set of behaviors.
Certainly these lessons can be seen to be counter-cultural, but we need to remember that this type of socialization is not uncontested by the society that the kids live in the vast majority of the time. I consider it a welcome retreat from a world that thinks they must act and be treated a certain way because of what’s between their legs.
I have zero problem lettng kids play with whatever they are interested in. Elly in particular has many ‘boy’ toys because she LOVES anything mechanical. Her and tools alone for an hour seriously scare the shit out of me.
I take issue with ignoring differences completly. It’s a step too far. This school has a culture where embracing fundemental differences is punishable and I can’t see a benefit in that.