No 'Him' or 'Her' in Preschool. Wait, what?

DementedSheep

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Yeah they are over doing it a bit. There is nothing wrong with showing things like snow white. If you?re going to worry about influencing you kids with that sort of thing you should be trying to show a buffet of different roles and trying not to constantly reinforce the same stereotype instead of just not showing the ?traditional? one at all. Kind of reminds me of the extreme feminists who go off at woman who actual want to stay home and look after the kids. Tho I may be misinterpreting it. Not referring to them as ?him? or ?her? seems a bit pedantic.
 

trollnystan

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SinisterGehe said:
trollnystan said:
Well, look for it no longer. The Finnish language has always had a jewel like this. "Hän" is our word for He/she, "Hänen" Him/Her, an so forth. It is totally neutral word.

It is possible but it can not be forced. Finnish has always had this, we are lucky with that. But trying to force thousands or years of language culture to change in matter of generation to achieve forced equality is stupid.
Chalk up another point in favour of Finland winning the crown of awesome =)

And yes, trying to force a change in one generation is stupid. But language evolves and hopefully it will eventually come up with a word similar to Finnish "hän" in both English and Swedish. And that evolution has to start somewhere I suppose.
 

Timmehexas

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The books on homosexuality are certainly a good idea, limiting your child's knowledge of the world will never help them. The whole removing him and her, thing and all that I'm a bit iffy about, it seems a bit excessive and doesn't really seem to limit gender roles in my opinion but hey we can only learn by experimenting.
 

AnneSQF

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I love the idea, but as mentioned in previous posts: Preschool should be preparing kids for the real world and SADLY the world doesn't look like that. But I would love if it was.
 

NickCaligo42

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Deschamps said:
Equality and tolerance should be achieved through education, not ignorance.
/Thread. Beautifully put, my friend, I can't say a lot more on it. This whole thing seems like it's going to backfire, sort of like trying to discourage sex by not teaching kids about the opposite gender's existence, or trying to discourage smoking by denying the existence of cigarettes. Those kids probably won't grow up too damaged since it's isolated to preschool and they'll have to go out into the real world sometime, but this is sheltering gone too far.
 

Rockchimp69

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zehydra said:
Deschamps said:
Equality and tolerance should be achieved through education, not ignorance.
this. They're not teaching children to accept differences, they're refusing to teach that the differences exist!
Another example of this is when they teach that the only difference between different races is skin colour, which isn't true.
If they taught the cultural and average physical differences a bit more there would be less racism.
 

ValnarCron

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The idea of instilling in children a near indifference to gender roles could improve equality though the methods described seem a tad blunt and undeveloped. It does seem that some of the criticism of this plan come from the fact that's it exposing kids to a highly distorted view of how society works or worse brainwashing them. But really almost all of early education is distorting, for instance, the reasonable decision not to show young kids violent or dark media skews their world view towards the positive. As for brainwashing, *&%^, some of the variables in basic morality such as who is a morally valuable being are instilled by the same process as "brainwashing."
 

Sparrow

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So, they impliment single and homosexual relation stories because there are none and then remove all the straight stories? So opposed to the kids growing up without never hearing of homosexual relationships, they'll now grow up without hearing of straight relationships instead. What smartass thought this shit up?
 

Rockchimp69

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trollnystan said:
SinisterGehe said:
trollnystan said:
Well, look for it no longer. The Finnish language has always had a jewel like this. "Hän" is our word for He/she, "Hänen" Him/Her, an so forth. It is totally neutral word.

It is possible but it can not be forced. Finnish has always had this, we are lucky with that. But trying to force thousands or years of language culture to change in matter of generation to achieve forced equality is stupid.
Chalk up another point in favour of Finland winning the crown of awesome =)

And yes, trying to force a change in one generation is stupid. But language evolves and hopefully it will eventually come up with a word similar to Finnish "hän" in both English and Swedish. And that evolution has to start somewhere I suppose.
There already is, "them", "their", "they" and "they're" can be used to describe someone regardless of gender.
E.g. "Who's this new guy I keep hearing about?"
"I don't know their name but I'd like to meet them. I heard they're starting next week"
 

smartengine

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Well hen does exist... it's an animal :D

but seriously that's ridiculous. I'm against discrimination of any kind, but there are differences between male and female. Kids should learn to accept them not to make think they're all the same.
 

Prince Regent

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I don't see why this is such a bad idea. The him/her thing might be taking things a little too far, but other than that I'm fine with it.

In a few years we can see if these children grow up to be more open minded individuals. I'm looking forward to the results.
 

StBishop

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lacktheknack said:
DERP.

This reminds me of a customer at a grocery store I work at... he complained about the "Moms and Tots" parking spot being discriminatory against single fathers. The best part is that his wife was right there.

Nope, I don't understand why people get hung up on gender. Where'd they come up with this idea, anyways?

Also, is depicting stereotypes really a bad thing? When 90% of the population (or so) is straight, and about 60% of them married, then how is depicting a straight marriage "reinforcing a negative stereotype"? (I'm assuming it's somehow negative, otherwise they wouldn't take umbrage to it.)
I don't know where you live but it's closer to 66& in Australia as far as I know.

Infernai said:
....I'll just use this picture to describe my reaction to this Stupidity(bonus points if you know where it's from):

Bonus points for Black Adder? Really?

EDIT: More specifically, just in case someone's like "Oh my, you don't know which Blackadder", I realise that it's "goes forth."
 

trollnystan

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Rockchimp69 said:
There already is, "them", "their", "they" and "they're" can be used to describe someone regardless of gender.
E.g. "Who's this new guy I keep hearing about?"
"I don't know their name but I'd like to meet them. I heard they're starting next week"
Ah but if you'd read my first post I was talking about a gender-free pronoun in the singular =)

True, the English language might go that way and maybe it'll sound natural then, but to present-day-me that example you wrote made my brain hurt a little. And I'm pretty sure it's still grammatically incorrect to use in formal situations.
 

Jaime_Wolf

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Oathy said:
To make choices on sexuality and gender when they are this young is unnecessary.
I'm pretty sure that was exactly the point. Rather than tell them what they have to act and think like, they're leaving the option open. They're saying "you're too young to make up your mind, so we're certainly not going to decide for you".

As many have said, a lot of the "classic" stories about princesses and such are pretty fucking terrible. Almost all of them are about poor helpless women rescued by men. Very rarely does the woman have any interest aside from marriage (which will typically solve all of her problems the instant the ring hits the finger). As a good indication, try to find one of those stories that meets the Bechdel test. The odds are not in your favour.

The notion that children will be "confused" by things like this or won't know what to do when they enter the "real world" is complete bullshit. The only time children ever get confused by these things is when adults tell them that they should be confused. The only real downside to this is that they're going to hit a point where they realise how fucked up the rest of the world is about all of this stuff.

The gender-neutral pronoun is nothing new either - there have been efforts to create and use them in a lot of languages (many languages already have fully-grammatical gender-neutral pronouns) that have been going on for a long time. You're right that it's unlikely that the invented ones will catch on though. Still, I doubt any child would be confused upon learning that other people don't use the word - they'd just stop using it in the same way that anyone avoids using certain words around people they know won't understand them.

What they're doing should be applauded.
 

Penguin_Factory

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I agree with what they're trying to do here- a lot of stuff aimed at young children does reinforce gender stereotypes (those kitchen playsets aimed at girls always make me cringe). And I can totally see where they're coming from with not including stories such as snow white.

But at the same time, making up a new gender-neutral word is stupid. I think it would be better if such a word existed, but unfortunately it doesn't. All this is going to do is confuse them.

lacktheknack said:
Nope, I don't understand why people get hung up on gender.
I'm assuming from your name you're a guy. That's kind of like a millionaire saying they don't understand why people get hung up on money.

And where exactly did I say don't teach about it? They are preschoolers. They don't care about homesexuals or any of that stuff yet all they care about is whether or not they get to play with their favourite toy or not.
They also don't care about maths or history or any of the other things they're soon going to be taught about in school.

There is young and too young. Preschool is too young. Kids need to be allowed to just be kids for as long as they can be. The moment they start asking about it yes educate them but until then let them remain oblivious.
I've seen this same rational used to argue that kids shouldn't know about sex until they hit whatever arbitrary age is deemed appropriate. I don't get this idea that childhood is somehow linked to ignorance. How is knowing about homosexuality going to not allow them to be kids any more? Do you become less and less of a child the more you learn about sexuality? In that case, does learning about genetics or history or any other subject also make you less of a child?

And even if it does, why is that a bad thing?
 

Jaime_Wolf

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trollnystan said:
Rockchimp69 said:
There already is, "them", "their", "they" and "they're" can be used to describe someone regardless of gender.
E.g. "Who's this new guy I keep hearing about?"
"I don't know their name but I'd like to meet them. I heard they're starting next week"
Ah but if you'd read my first post I was talking about a gender-free pronoun in the singular =)

True, the English language might go that way and maybe it'll sound natural then, but to present-day-me that example you wrote made my brain hurt a little. And I'm pretty sure it's still grammatically incorrect to use in formal situations.
You are mistaken, gender-neutral them is a singular pronoun that's retained the plural morphology of its plural ancestor. Use of they to refer to individuals is pervasive in virtually every variety of modern English (naturally, this doesn't stop the usual amateur grammarians from saying that this is somehow "wrong").

Notice how mismatches in grammatical number in structures like this sound really bad:
Whenever I see friends, I wave to him.

Yet singular antecedents with them are absolutely fine:
Whenever I see a friend, I wave to them.

The fact that singular they has become so common is actually one of the main reasons that none of the constructed gender-neutral pronouns are ever likely catch on in English - they're redundant.