In Sweden many state preschools are crusading for a gender deconstruction. Educators are in the classroom teaching children to combat tradition, not just counting or the alphabet.
Such is the case of the Seafarer preschool in Stockholm, when the children were just two years old, the teachers identified a problem: they were too restless and focused on themselves. Children screamed, hit and kicked. His restlessness greatly stressed his teachers; the girls, on the other hand, only cried, complained and asked adults for favors. The teachers were disturbed to see them and recognize in them the perfectly reproduced gender stereotype: the boys began to threaten a masculinity that was more cultural than biological; her companions, with that condescension with which we unfortunately associate the female gender.
In this school, the management does not accept these gender impositions. So the teachers removed from the classroom everything that could divide them, and turn them into stereotypes of what we believe of a boy and a girl: they removed strollers, dolls, balls, action figures. The boys were sent to the kitchen, and the girls were made to yell “no!”
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- In that country, doing this by the educational institution is allowed and celebrated.
Many of the teachers in Swedish preschools do not refer to the students as “he” or “she”. They prefer to do other things. They are called by their names, or they are called “friend”. The games are also organized in a way that the children are not divided by gender. They must learn that everyone has the same abilities to function both in games with great physical demand, and in others that suggest greater contemplation and patience.
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During the year 2012, a new pronoun was legally introduced for teachers to call their children in a neutral way: “hen”. Swedish educational institutions have gradually adapted it. Despite the fact that, at first, there were establishments that were totally against a suggestion to deconstruct the genre, the hen has been taking over more and more schools in the country.
According to world linguists, it is the first nation to adopt a measure of this nature.
One study designated these little students as “gender neutral preschools”. According to their conclusions, some behaviors thought to be “biological” behaviors disappear when students are given a pronoun that does not refer to any gender. Children at this school do not show a preference for playmates of the same gender. Boys and girls think that both have the same aptitudes for games associated with housework or soccer. However, specialists ensure that infants continue to perceive gender in the same way as before: making a direct association with physical appearance.
In Trodje, a small town that had no more than 333 inhabitants in its 2010 census, Ingemar Gens, a journalist who dabbled in anthropology and gender theory, had an idea. He had been studying a series of Swedes who were looking for Thai mail-order wives. Because of his research, he was named the “Equal Opportunity Expert” in his district, and from there, he wanted to break the norm of cold, impassive masculinity.
To attack the problem from the root, he started from preschool. Mainly, due to the amount of daily hours that Swedish children invested in educational establishments. He went through many suggesting his idea and eventually two schools decided to adopt his model. his name was “gender compensation strategy”. The teachers separated girls and boys for part of the day, and taught them “cultural norms” attached to the other gender.
The children had to sit on the floor and massage each other’s feet. The girls had to go out into the yard, walk barefoot in the snow. They screamed into the void until their vocal chords gave no more. The criticism did not take long to fall on the journalist, a place in which at the end of the 90s was one of the countries with the most traditional and stoic masculinity in all of Europe.
“They told us that we were indoctrinating the children. I say it’s something we always do. Parenting is indoctrination.”
Later, he went on to stop separating the children. She proposed a “gender neutral” approach that sought, broadly speaking, to eliminate the differences between the boys and girls in the room. Since then, Gens’s proposal began to spread by word of mouth. It came as a huge cry to the government. In 1998, Sweden was already adding a new form of expression to its national curriculum. This had a demand for preschoolers: to counteract both traditional gender roles and patterns. The show was beginning to require children to explore outside of their gender role limitations.
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Despite the fact that these new methods seem to show a promising panorama for European and even global education, there is a significant conservative sector that opposes these measures. The far-right party Sweden Democrats, which has been in power since 2014, has consistently threatened to suspend teaching that “seeks to change the behavior and gender identity of all children and young people.”
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