Yahoo news is running a story on the "Egalia" preschool in Stockholm. At this preschool students are not addressed as boys and girls, nor are there books which show a traditional family with a father, mother and children. The staff don't use words like "him" and "her", having invented a gender neutral pronoun to refer to both sexes.
The reason for this social engineering? Predictably it's based on two aspects of liberalism. One of the preschool teachers says that Egalia allows students to 'be whoever they want to be'. That's the liberal idea that we should, as the highest aim in life, be autonomous and determine our own self. Our sex is not something we get to self-determine so it's looked on negatively as a limitation or a restriction on what we can choose.
But why then did sex distinctions exist in the past? Left-liberals answer that it was because one group in society, men, wanted to get an unearned privilege (more autonomy) at the expense of an oppressed group (women). Therefore, left-liberals also assume that sex distinctions are based on inequality and should be redistributed more evenly amongst girls and boys. Tanja Bergqvist, a Swedish blogger critical of the preschool policy, believes that,
Those bent on shattering gender roles "say there's a hierarchy where everything that boys do is given higher value"
The Swedish policy does allow for the idea that boys and girls have different anatomies. But that's it. For everything else, they are held to be the same. The director of the preschool believes that to be equal the sexes must be held to be the same:
What matters is that children understand that their biological differences "don't mean boys and girls have different interests and abilities," Rajalin says. "This is about democracy. About human equality."
A few observations. First, I'm not suggesting that ordinary Swedes are as committed to these ideas as the political class. The fault in Sweden is with the state ideology that is being imposed on children.
Second, note how radical the state ideology of liberalism is. In a previous post, I compared it to indoctrination with Marxism-Leninism during the communist period in Russia. But a reader who had been brought up in a communist school thought that indoctrination in Russia was not quite as extreme:
I have gone to school in Soviet Union in the 1980s and we had less indoctrination than that. At least ... they did not try to convince us that there were no sexual distinctions.
Third, note the importance of political ideas. Whatever the political class of a society adopts as the highest good is going to be gradually implemented as social policy. So political theories like liberalism need to be fiercely contested.
Fourth, Tanja Bergqvist shows what can be done with the independent media. She's an intelligent Swedish woman who runs a blog criticising Swedish gender policy. She's become something like the official opposition within Sweden and now she's even being quoted in the foreign media. Well done Tanja!
Here's the text of the yahoo article:
STOCKHOLM – At the "Egalia" preschool, staff avoid using words like "him" or "her" and address the 33 kids as "friends" rather than girls and boys.
From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don't fall into gender stereotypes.
"Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing," says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. "Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be."
The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden's efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward.
Breaking down gender roles is a core mission in the national curriculum for preschools, underpinned by the theory that even in highly egalitarian-minded Sweden, society gives boys an unfair edge.
To even things out, many preschools have hired "gender pedagogues" to help staff identify language and behavior that risk reinforcing stereotypes.
Some parents worry things have gone too far. An obsession with obliterating gender roles, they say, could make the children confused and ill-prepared to face the world outside kindergarten.
"Different gender roles aren't problematic as long as they are equally valued," says Tanja Bergkvist, a 37-year-old blogger and a leading voice against what she calls "gender madness" in Sweden.
Those bent on shattering gender roles "say there's a hierarchy where everything that boys do is given higher value, but I wonder who decides that it has higher value," she says. "Why is there higher value in playing with cars?"
At Egalia — the title connotes "equality" — boys and girls play together with a toy kitchen, waving plastic utensils and pretending to cook. One boy hides inside the toy stove, his head popping out through a hole.
Lego bricks and other building blocks are intentionally placed next to the kitchen, to make sure the children draw no mental barriers between cooking and construction.
Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. From a bookcase, she pulls out a story about two male giraffes who are sad to be childless — until they come across an abandoned crocodile egg.
Nearly all the children's books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children. There are no "Snow White," "Cinderella" or other classic fairy tales seen as cementing stereotypes.
Rajalin, 52, says the staff also try to help the children discover new ideas when they play.
"A concrete example could be when they're playing 'house' and the role of the mom already is taken and they start to squabble," she says. "Then we suggest two moms or three moms and so on."
Egalia's methods are controversial; some say they amount to mind control. Rajalin says the staff have received threats from racists apparently upset about the preschool's use of black dolls.
But she says that there's a long waiting list for admission to Egalia, and that only one couple has pulled a child out of the school.
Jukka Korpi, 44, says he and his wife chose Egalia "to give our children all the possibilities based on who they are and not on their gender."
Sweden has promoted women's rights for decades, and more recently was a pioneer among European countries in allowing gay and lesbian couples to legalize their partnerships and adopt children.
Gender studies permeate academic life in Sweden. Bergkvist noted on her blog that the state-funded Swedish Science Council had granted $80,000 for a postdoctoral fellowship aimed at analyzing "the trumpet as a symbol of gender."
Jay Belsky, a child psychologist at the University of California, Davis, said he's not aware of any other school like Egalia, and he questioned whether it was the right way to go.
"The kind of things that boys like to do — run around and turn sticks into swords — will soon be disapproved of," he said. "So gender neutrality at its worst is emasculating maleness."
Egalia is unusual even for Sweden. Staff try to shed masculine and feminine references from their speech, including the pronouns him or her — "han" or "hon" in Swedish. Instead, they've have adopted the genderless "hen," a word that doesn't exist in Swedish but is used in some feminist and gay circles.
"We use the word "Hen" for example when a doctor, police, electrician or plumber or such is coming to the kindergarten," Rajalin says. "We don't know if it's a he or a she so we just say 'Hen is coming around 2 p.m.' Then the children can imagine both a man or a woman. This widens their view."
Egalia doesn't deny the biological differences between boys and girls — the dolls the children play with are anatomically correct.
What matters is that children understand that their biological differences "don't mean boys and girls have different interests and abilities," Rajalin says. "This is about democracy. About human equality."
No comments:
Post a Comment