PC preschool bans words 'him' and 'her'

Originally posted by guessing

The problem I have is that children should just be children, innocent and not tools or pawns. This is disgusting.

They are children for goodness sake.. let them be normal children....

edit on 27-6-2011 by guessing because: italic quotation

I don't get it...kids are pawns by corporations every day, through cartoons, through all sorts of slimy advertising, through groups and churches and even parents teaching them things...

and it never ends.

This is just a new example that appears to be trying to allow more freedom of choice for the kid than previous...ya, its new...and new things scare old systems (even if the system is broken)...but if you step back and just consider what it is your objecting to...you realize its not really anything in specific beyond...just change in general.

Change is good when it is change to advance social and personal acceptance

Should we now also remove Boy and Girl, or Male and Female when it comes to toilets, sanitation of our ways and language is a terrible thing.

Originally posted by PsykoOps

You're not seriously suggesting that everyone in a country where there is no gender specific words like that have their kids minds and souls corrupted? Like here in Finland for example?

Words in a language's grammar? Of course not.

Forcing boys to play with dolls and girls to play with trucks? Unnatural.

Do you have common sense in Finland?

reply to post by marsend


Despite the fact you are joking, you have actually hit on the inner problem of political correctness.

These people think words come before everything. Even biology.

It starts more innocuously: "no matter what your intent, using this word is wrong." Here we see the use of a specific word privilaged over the intentions that inform the choice of a word, which is the first place political correctness goes awry. It takes the unnatural and incorrect doctrine of semiotics: Thought is impossible without words, which common sense should tell you is untrue.

From there it spreads out, becoming sicker, until we see the final absurdiy: Words become more important than biology. If words and biology conflict, it is the demands of biology that must bend, not the iron rigid laws of forming the right politically correct phrase.

The reason these people worship words is that words are all they have: Professors, writers, theorists, etc. At the end of the day they cannot conceive of any value without words, and it is by insisting this loudly (and destructively) that they secure their places and salaries as parasites in society.

Originally posted by SaturnFX
there is nothing wrong with a boy wanting to play football, or spend the day baking...thats the point...its not to say somethings wrong...its to say nothing is wrong in what you desire to do as a person.

In theory maybe.

In practice what would happen: "Suzie, why are you playing with that doll? Don't you want to play with a ball like Amanda? Look at Amanda. She is liberated. Why aren't you liberated?"

reply to post by SaturnFX


Actually no, I am objecting to the removal of identity, albeit in whatever form (the identity) is.

Children do not need to be isolated and de personalised in early childhood development.

All it means in this instance, is the child is exposed to unnessesary realities at an age where they are vulnerable and to be frank, this is nothing more than deconstruction of normal male/ females roles.

The children could be exposed to the same programming at a later stage in their life, where they are more emotionally mature to grasp the concepts.

Originally posted by Partygirl
In theory maybe.

In practice what would happen: "Suzie, why are you playing with that doll? Don't you want to play with a ball like Amanda? Look at Amanda. She is liberated. Why aren't you liberated?"

Why are you making stuff up?
Is it part of your religion to bear false witness?

Your lying...there is no rosey way of saying that...I have read your other responses of this "forcing" you speak of..when there is absolutely no mention of that.

If suzie goes to play dolls, she goes to play with dolls...if she wants to go play baseball, she goes to play baseball...no "dolltime for girls" or anything like that.

Your quickly painting a picture of what type of person you are...you will lie and distort all of reality to make a very shaky point. I would have greater issue of my children learning their "morals" from you than attending this school frankly.

lying is bad...understand?


Read the bloody article already if your -that- confused.

Liberals understand biology about as much as they understand economics.

Originally posted by guessing
reply to post by SaturnFX

 

Actually no, I am objecting to the removal of identity, albeit in whatever form (the identity) is.

Children do not need to be isolated and de personalised in early childhood development.

All it means in this instance, is the child is exposed to unnessesary realities at an age where they are vulnerable and to be frank, this is nothing more than deconstruction of normal male/ females roles.

The children could be exposed to the same programming at a later stage in their life, where they are more emotionally mature to grasp the concepts.

The expression goes:

Give me the boy till the age of 7 and I will give you the man.

the formulative years is exactly when you want to hit these areas of roles and understanding of self. later does not "stick".

Again, this is not wiping away personal biological instinct...this is about opening a door to let a child express not how society DEMANDS them to be, but simply how they want to be...
the anatomical dolls demonstrate they are not trying to erase gender...just the roles society demands on how they express themselves...they let the child decide verses programming.

its deprogramming...what the argument against the school is...is that they are NOT programming the children as we have been programmed...we are screaming that someone is about to become independent of the machine and decide for themselves.

collective revulsuon for someone doing things differently, yet we often scream of how the norm is just wrong.

Let biology decide how these kids express their roles, not disney cartoons and reinforcement of what is right and wrong

but the hen thing is stupid...that I disagree with.

Originally posted by lucid eyes
Liberals understand biology about as much as they understand economics.

Sorry, are we now to start partisan flaming?

There is only one thing to be said about the subject: YOUR Children are being massively brainwashed in government schools, and that in a way, they will turn against you, the parents, one of these days. The only answer to that is, dont send your children into government schools to be molded into obidient canon fodder. Flee the country if you have to, but dont give away your children to madmen who mold them into obidient brain dead canon fodder!!!!!!!!

Am I the only one who thinks this is a good idea? I have a little sister and I constantly try to change her mind when she says things like "that's for boys" or something. Generally, women can do anything men do and vice versa. Erasing gender roles is a good thing. Maybe these children will grow up less sexist than the rest of their peers.

Originally posted by SaturnFX

Originally posted by guessing
reply to post by SaturnFX

 

The expression goes:

Give me the boy till the age of 7 and I will give you the man.

the formulative years is exactly when you want to hit these areas of roles and understanding of self. later does not "stick".

Again, this is not wiping away personal biological instinct...this is about opening a door to let a child express not how society DEMANDS them to be, but simply how they want to be...
the anatomical dolls demonstrate they are not trying to erase gender...just the roles society demands on how they express themselves...they let the child decide verses programming.

its deprogramming...what the argument against the school is...is that they are NOT programming the children as we have been programmed...we are screaming that someone is about to become independent of the machine and decide for themselves.

collective revulsuon for someone doing things differently, yet we often scream of how the norm is just wrong.

Let biology decide how these kids express their roles, not disney cartoons and reinforcement of what is right and wrong

but the hen thing is stupid...that I disagree with.

The reality is in this instance that parents are the ones who decide how their children are brought up, what school they attend and what the child is or is not exposed to.

Does there need to be a government institution to teach pre school students to 'deprogramme' the normal biological roles of humans?

It appears the pre school is modelling the learning on equality? Equality is something that is subjective and the desicions that are made in the name of equality, they too become subjective.

When biased reporting influences people ability to rationalise sound judgement, institutionalisation of inadequate practices perpertuates ill health.

In this instance the children have no say and their lives are forever changed.

Why did the pre school not move the kitchen to where the lego blocks were? Instead of the other way round? Why not remove both the kitchen and the lego blocks to prevent any form of favouritism.

There is an agenda going on here.
i do not believe it is good for the children

Originally posted by Throwback
Am I the only one who thinks this is a good idea? I have a little sister and I constantly try to change her mind when she says things like "that's for boys" or something. Generally, women can do anything men do and vice versa. Erasing gender roles is a good thing. Maybe these children will grow up less sexist than the rest of their peers.

My daughter says " I want to watch a little girls show on the television"

That does not mean that I will be exposing her to non gender ideals. It does not mean I will force her to watch little boys shows. If she wants to she will. She is equally at home playing with hammer and nails , nuts and bolts as she is playing dress ups. But... she is a little girl. She is aware of it. It means that she gets support for what she wants. It's about balance and choice, not about institutional brainwashing

Originally posted by SaturnFX

What part of the article, beyond the naming thing, do you find objectionable and why?

The article says the children are being brought up to believe that even though males and females are biologically different, that doesn't mean they have different interests and abilities. They're being taught that the fact they have different natures is somehow wrong. This can only cause insecurity and bitterness in the long run.

Teaching your children (not just in the gender aspect) that they are just as capable as anyone else is robbing them a healthy sense of reality. Children need to be taught that there will always be someone more intelligent, more athletic, more capable at certain things etc. than them...and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Giving children a false sense of hope is an egregious disservice to them and is damaging to their well-being. Egalitarianism is a cancer that needs to be done away with.

There's no doubt in my mind that masculine behavior in the boys will be suppressed in this 'experiment'. Any show of aggressiveness or militancy, such as playing 'guns' will be shunned.

Originally posted by SaturnFX

or would you subscribe to the current and old methods of doing things (that have shown the results we have today of division, anger, insecurity, etc

With increased violent crime, suicide, and divorce in the last 50 years, something tells me enforcing false ideals of equality on generation after generation is not the way to go. The division, anger, and insecurity you speak of is because of the 'new method' that really took off in the 60's.

Far better than dictating who a person can be and how they can express themselves just because of what's between their legs.

Some people are rejects and should not be in contact with children. This a social experiment on children and morons are grinning and nodding along with it. You can tell little Billy he can be a mommy all you want but in the end he (much to the education systems dismay) wont grow a vagina.

reply to post by Partygirl


Why? My daughter can build a robot out of legos. Plays with "trucks" and can cook her own food. Where did I go wrong?

Pardon my soapbox, but this is a hot button issue for me. Only start in on this convoluted bad boy if you have a minute and some patience to spare:

All this grandiose, meticulous planning, despite its naively good intentions, is just reinforcing the same problems that start and contribute to prejudice. Did any of them, for a moment, stop to think about how outlandishly egotistical this approach is? Who do they think these children are, self-important grad students dying to impress one another with the depth of their cultural sensitivity? Sounds like a more apt description of the teachers, who seem to care a whole lot more about their high minded ideals and not so much about treating these children like people.

Children are not stupid, and particularly at a young age, they are not very much influenced by ham-handed attempts to teach them equality. Take one look at how well segregation, as it stands, has served us. Racial tensions are as high as ever. The children segregate *themselves* in the lunchrooms and everywhere else. In our eagerness to bridge the gap between the races we have done nothing but harp on and on about the need to 'close the divide between us'. So they take the n-word out of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, make every kid's show cast a spew-worthy balance of carefully selected ethnic and gender stereotypes, pop in a copy of 'Remember the Titans' and call it a day.

NONE of these superficial actions, especially when taken in context of these same legislators profiting off of the destruction of the family unit and the prison industry complex, addresses the root of any of these problems.

How do kids learn? Concepts like 'repetition' and 'audio/visual learning' flash through our heads, but they're just random keywords and ideas we use to try and explain how they learn when the answer is right in front of us.

THEY LEARN BY WATCHING *US*.

They are wide-eyed little sponges who gurgle and smile when they see our face seems happy, or cry if we seem mad or upset. As time goes on they mimic the shape of our mouths and the noises we make, and they learn to communicate with us. They have no logic or reason just yet, but they have emotion in abundance. And like the little sponges they are, they soak up our facial expressions, our habits, and most importantly, our attitudes and emotions.

Next time you're out in public, look at a baby. What are they almost always looking at? Faces! Their mother's, a stranger's, and sometimes yours if they sense you looking at them and make eye contact. They're learning now that all this Baby Einstein crap is meaningless. Unless a baby has a human being interacting with them, they won't learn nearly as well if at all. In fact, if you just take care of their perfunctory needs and never hold them, they can die! They are conditioned to feed off of physical as /well/ as emotional nourishment.

They sit back and watch us. They watch us segregate 'these people' from 'those people' and treat them differently because of it. They watch us fight with our spouses, or talk poorly about ourselves, or throw things in a childish tantrum, or scream when angry. They watch us as we only respect those we feel are more powerful than us, and depending on what appeals most to them, they strive to mimic the role of either the abuser or the grovelling abused.

You have SO many kids now that have had zero guidance growing up. Almost no emotional nourishment. For whatever reasons, noble or not, mom and dad are out and they're a latchkey kid. Law unto themselves. Nobody to give structure to their life. Nobody to make them feel cherished and secure and worthy of attention. Ever read about how messed up those poor kids from Russian orphanages are after being abandoned all that time? Lots of rage, emotional detachment, depersonalization, etc. Well, it happens right here, too.

When you have no structure, your life is a meandering, pointless mess instead of the journey it's meant to be. That's why you have all these kids, many intelligent, some brilliant, who waste their lives trying to get high so they can just feel something for once. They look to brutality for a sense of security, or to self-degrading sexual behaviors that they think will make them feel close to someone, or just important, or hell, even just attractive. They waste their lives in front of screens posting stupid tidbits about their day because there's a yawning black hole in them that is desperate to be SEEN and a tragic belief that there's not much to look at.

I'm not saying this broad brush applies to everybody, but admit it! It's a huge cultural issue right now. We are evolving further away from our status as a communal species and you can really see it in the youth. Detached. Dead to this world. Clinging to escape in their lurid imaginations, books, shows, drugs, sex, movies, facebooks, whatever, self-harming in record numbers, doped up on meds that, in most cases, do them /no/ favors.

They're reverting to animal-like behaviors, for God's sake! The flash mobs, the reckless violence, the pack mentality of gangs from the Crips to the Plastics. They feel worthless and as such attribute worth to nothing in return. What separates us from animals is not just our awareness, but in how we approach life. Animals are in survival mode. We may have to resort to it ourselves, but mostly, we make room for living versus just staying alive. Even in our darkest hour, mankind still made time to learn, interact, celebrate, and create. It is the remnants of our creative and emotional offerings that have stood the test of time and still resonate with us today.

Many kids these days are in full-on survival mode. Piss and moan all you want about how badly inner city children misbehave, but do YOU live in an environment where from day one you learned that any sign of weakness could kill you? It's all well and good to watch that stupid Michelle Pfeiffer movie where she descends unto the uneducated minority masses like a White Learned Angel of Mercy and teaches them about poetry and crap, but get real!

You ever been to North Philly? You try telling those kids about the importance of conjugating verbs when, on their walk to school, they pass by beefy dudes carrying billybats with bloodstains on them, or people openly carrying firearms. If you think I'm exaggerating, go take the trip yourself. I wish to God I was kidding or exaggerating the daily horrors these people face. The only thing they have a reason to learn is the metric system and you can bet your ass they don't learn it in school.

So many of us have noooo idea what goes on in there aside from watching Barber Shop with Queen Latifah on VH1. Blah blah blah fake nails, blah blah blah weaves, blah blah blah Tyler Perry dressed as an old lady, blah blah blah soul food. We glorify the violence and defang it at the same time because nobody wants to realize that yes, in America, people go hungry. Or have to sell crack at 13 to pay rent. Or let their stepdad rape them because they know their mom has nowhere else to go.

This isn't a black or white problem. It is a POVERTY problem. When you strip away people's basic needs for physical and emotional nourishment and force them to compete for finite resources, most abandon compassion in order to survive.

And then we condemn them for it and act all surprised and wring our hands. "Oh lord! So many youths, blacks especially, committing crimes! I wonder if, perhaps, it might have something to do with hamstringing them at every turn, demolishing their community and family structure with a lot of convenient coc aine in the 80's, ensnaring them in the prison system of which they have no hope of escaping, and on top of that, never giving them the education or safe environment they need to contribute to society. And on top of THAT, instead of fixing any of this, throwing money at them to shut them up and buy their votes so they depend on us to support them! Hmmm... nah. They just like to whine."


This concept of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" has been utterly bastardized. Look, if two people are having a race, and the one of them is wearing metal armor, what do you tell him when he collapses across the finish line last? "Well, if you REALLY wanted to win, you'd run ten times as hard to get the same results as the other guy!" And there are still those that manage to do it despite the setback! Incredible!

Or do you perhaps question why he was made to wear armor to the race in the first place? Expand the concept. Is little Ramon just stupid and unwilling to assimilate, or is he perhaps struggling to learn an entire new language and dealing with total culture shock? Is Kathy not studying as hard as you know she can because she's just lazy, or is she juggling schoolwork on top of taking care of a drunk mother at home? And don't we still act all impatient with women for not Getting Over It Already when misogyny is so deeply ingrained in our culture that we don't even see it for what it is? Isn't this insidious bigotry what they're trying to fight /against/ with this genderless school?

All this comes to the same point: Children are NOT robots that you can program. They are infinitely clever and perceptive and you're not fooling them at all with the charade. Lecture on all you want about the Spanish Inquisition, but it's your scathing criticism they will learn from. You can read Keats until you're blue in the face but if they can sense that you don't really care about Keats, they're not going to get excited either.

They are not watching the bauble in your hands during the magic show. They watch *you*. Your face, your minute expressions, how you deal with kindness and rudeness in turn. And the more self-assured and happy you seem, the more credence they give to your example because what you are doing is working for you. And if you extend that sincere love to them- even a little bit- it would surprise you how many of them blossom under it.

So instead of vainly assuming that we can cram whatever we want into a child's head, we need to realize that developed or not, /they are people/. Clever, loving, sweet, kind, devious, selfish, all of it in spades. You can't legislate morality or tolerance and you sure as hell can't teach them through rote memorization.

Provide them with a stable environment, clear boundaries, and firm authority. It does wonders for any kid. And then stop making *them* the focus of their education and turn that focus *outwards*. Instead of setting them on the hamster wheel from day one by making the focus on a career, start out by focusing on harnessing their curiosity, creativity, and capability for critical and logical thought. Simple games could accomplish that. While they're still at that young age, then you teach them new languages when their brains can absorb it!

Stop emphasizing their disabilities! Instead of condescending to them or even smarmily harping on about what a special snowflake they are, just be matter of fact about it. Focus on finding a different way for them to achieve the same goal and make the GOAL the focus, not the disability. If you treat someone like they're fully capable, they learn that capability comes from within, not from circumstances outside of your control.

Through example, show them the inherent worth of knowledge instead of making it Useless Crap That Might Get You a Job. Cut this focus on standardized tests and focus on giving these kids applicable knowledge, and start making more practical tests!

A glove is to a sock as a bad simile is to:
a) potato chip
b) George Washington
c) Keeping a straight face while expecting kids to take this bunk seriously

And can we stop assuming they're too dumb to learn certain things? Kids are tough and clever! Try being a Dickensian-era street rat. It wasn't all charming little hats and choreographed songs. There are eight-year-olds who pick through garbage all day to try and support their younger siblings in abject poverty. Not so long ago, a fourteen-year-old girl would be raising a kid. No matter what horrendous mess we've thrown at them, they not only roll with the punches, but they still manage to find time to play.

Respect them as people without granting them the power to have adults cringing in fear over a lawsuit. Teach critical thinking instead of rote memorization. Bring concepts together to examine their overall message instead of piecemealing it into meaninglessness. Treat them like they are capable, intelligent, and productive. Expect nothing less from them. They'll amaze you.

Tackling education alone as the problem is laughable. WE are the problem. Look at this mess we've all made, whether it be through greed or apathy! Before you go heaping disgust on "all these young hooligans", take a good look at yourself first. If they need to learn that it's important to treat others with love and dignity, so do you.

But the great thing here is that while we may be the problem, we are also the solution. Love yourself first. Then you can start loving others. And once that sinks in, this fear and apathy will lift. The strength of our determination to do right by our kids will give us what we need to dismantle this stupid and ineffectual system and put something better in its place.

We reap what we sow, and now we're so worried about burning the chaff it hasn't occurred to anybody to go further back in the process. I'm not one to shirk the concept of personal responsibility when it comes to how someone behaves, but that also means I don't shirk the responsibility I bear in supporting systems that oppress others.

I wholeheartedly believe that one day, we will step up to the plate and take care to sow *all* our seeds so they will be worth harvesting, but just the ones with richer school districts. So many of these kids, no matter how damaged, have a humbling intensity of emotion. Respect it.



TL;DR MOM! Put down your cell phone and watch your kid at the diving board for God's sake!!