distortedreality said:
Darken12 said:
We don't know if, in fact, boys playing with toy cars harmed no one.
Um......how would a boy playing with cars hurt anyone?
I agree that a child's gender identity is influenced by their interactions and environment from an early age, but I fail to see how playing with toy cars could influence a child of either sex in any inherently negative way, and I don't see how any sort of research of this would be beneficial or worth while to anyone.
Excessive strife? From playing with toy cars? Unless the child has a specific drive to shove their toys into places they shouldn't, I can't equate excessive strife with toy cars.
Reading the Swedish blog post through Translate, it
seems[footnote]Obv it would be much better for someone who can actually read Swedish to sum it up, but Norse languages are prolly the least likely for machine translation to English to fuck up. That said, the blog post is quoting a book or something for its actual information, and much of the blogger's writing seems to be whining about the book, so getting info from the actual primary source would be more useful.[/footnote] like part of the idea is that boys and girls will have ample access to toys coded for their genders outside of the school, so the school should give them an opportunity to interact with other toys while there so as to destigmatize them. Basically, the school should be teaching things that are least likely to be taught elsewhere. It's described as "kompensatorisk pedagogik," rendered as "compensatory education" by autotranslate. But it also
seems to talk about the prestige placed on toys coded male above other toys being behind the decision, thus attempting to present toys coded female as being just as legitimate. The idea being that the school can allow boys to play with "girl" things and police any hostility from other boys regarding that, thus giving boys who may be more into those things a space in which they can find out they're more into those things and/or a space in which they can play with them with as little opposition as possible.
Anyway... as for strife, there's incredible pressure placed on boys (usually peer pressure from other boys their age, though it's often reinforced by authority figures like parents/teachers and society in general) to conform to masculine gender roles from a very early age. There's pressure placed on girls to conform as well... but not really as much, or in the same way. People tend to be
much more accepting of a so-called tomboy than a boy who likes "girly" things. This essentially stems from misogyny: because toys, behaviors, styles of dress, etc that are coded female carry less prestige than those coded male, the girl is seen in a sense as trading up, while the boy is seen as lowering himself. This has the dual effect of making girls who are into "girly" things feel that their interests are not as valuable, while making boys who are into "girly" things hide their affinity for fear of becoming social pariahs.
(Personal anecdote: I almost got held back in kindergarten for "behavioral problems." Specifically, for getting in a fight with a kid who constantly made fun of me for being really into the toy kitchen.)
I'm not saying that removing toy cars is necessarily the best response to this problem. If anything, it prolly caused resentment in the kids who liked them, and they might have seen it as taking away the "good" toys and making them play with "dumb" ones. But it is a problem.
Darken12 said:
In my personal experience, trading cards were banned at my primary school because they caused a lot of verbal and physical fighting between children. Very vicious, too. They were such an expensive and overvalued item (third world country here, btw) that they were considered a social status symbol in the playground hierarchy, and because they were so excessively overvalued, we resorted to really extreme measures to get our hands on them, we reacted very violently when we perceived that a trading wasn't fair or when the games that the trading cards were for didn't go our way (or someone was perceived to have cheated), and a host of other problems (stealing, distracting attention from the class, etc). There were a couple of weeks (or maybe more?) where the school slowly spiralled out of control.
While I'm not saying that this is necessarily what happened, I can imagine that toy cars were overvalued (because of kids gender-coding them as male and therefore more "awesome"), and that generated strife among kids (if it helps with the visualisation, imagine the toy cars were considered a luxury item, with all the hierarchical consequences that implies).
Oh geez, this reminded me of pogs in like... third or fourth grade? (In case they were a strictly US thing, ~2cm radius cardboard circles with pictures on them. Two players contribute an equal number to make a stack, then they take turns hitting the stack with a metal circle of the same radius. The player keeps any that land face-up after the hit.) Essentially, gambling for kids. There was a certain technique to doing it well, so those of us who were good at it racked up an impressive number of the things, while those who weren't had to convince their parents to buy more if they wanted to participate in what
everyone considered to be the Most Important Thing Ever. As you can imagine, this spawned plenty of cons, parent complaints, theft, and fistfights until the school banned them.
(My friend and I had a few nice shark routines we played during recess. We'd find kids who we hadn't played against before or in a while. We'd play against each other, ostensibly for keeps, but it was prearranged who would win or lose and we'd swap our pogs back after. The "loser" would then be able to play someone else for real, get a hefty wager, and usually win a sizable number of pogs. Then ofc there was the more traditional strat of intentionally losing a few small wagers to get a much larger wager to win. Good times.)
