National Review Online – by Katherine Timpf
A Nebraska school district has instructed its teachers to stop referring to students by “gendered expressions” such as “boys and girls,” and use “gender inclusive” ones such as “purple penguins” instead.
“Don’t use phrases such as ‘boys and girls,’ ‘you guys,’ ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ and similarly gendered expressions to get kids’ attention,” instructs a training document given to middle-school teachers at the Lincoln Public Schools.
“Create classroom names and then ask all of the ‘purple penguins’ to meet on the rug,” it advises.
The document also warns against asking students to “line up as boys or girls,” and suggests asking them to line up by whether they prefer “skateboards or bikes/milk or juice/dogs or cats/summer or winter/talking or listening.”
“Always ask yourself . . . ‘Will this configuration create a gendered space?’” the document says.
The instructions were part of a list called “12 steps on the way to gender inclusiveness” developed by Gender Spectrum, an organization that “provides education, training and support to help create a gender sensitive and inclusive environment for children of all ages.”
Other items on the list include asking all students about their preferred pronouns and decorating the classroom with “all genders welcome” door hangers.
If teachers still find it “necessary” to mention that genders exist at all, the document states, they must list them as “boy, girl, both or neither.”
Furthermore, it instructs teachers to interfere and interrupt if they ever hear a student talking about gender in terms of “boys and girls” so the student can learn that this is wrong.
“Point out and inquire when you hear others referencing gender in a binary manner,” it states. “Ask things like . . . ‘What makes you say that? I think of it a little differently.’ Provide counter-narratives that challenge students to think more expansively about their notions of gender.”
The teachers were also given a handout created by the Center for Gender Sanity, which explains to them that “Gender identity . . . can’t be observed or measured, only reported by the individual,” and an infographic called “The Genderbred Person,” which was produced by www.ItsPronouncedMetroSexual.com.
Despite controversy, Lincoln Superintendent Steve Joel has declared that he is “happy” and “pleased” with the training documents.
“We don’t get involved with politics,” he told KLIN Radio’s Drive Time Lincoln radio show.
“We don’t get involved with gender preferences. We’re educating all kids . . . and we can’t be judgmental,” he said.
— Katherine Timpf is a reporter at National Review Online.
These assholes should be deported to some desolate island full of penguins.
The goal of the school MUST BE to create MORONS out of little BOYS and GIRLS….
Hopefully the parents will put an end to this BS.
Steve Joel: Asshole for the day.
““Don’t use phrases such as ‘boys and girls,’ ‘you guys,’ ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ and similarly gendered expressions to get kids’ attention,” instructs a training document given to middle-school teachers at the Lincoln Public Schools.
“Create classroom names and then ask all of the ‘purple penguins’ to meet on the rug,” it advises.”
I remember back in the day, we’d take people who are instituting shit like this out back and beat the hell out of them. (Sigh!) I miss those days…..
Something really strange is going on with identity formation these days. I like to connect dots. There may not be a connection, but I like to connect them anyhow. You never know.
So I’m seeing this juxtaposed with the latest political correctness: “cultural appropriation” whereby white people can no longer take on or try on any characteristics of another culture, particularly a culture of a different race, because that would be “racist.” I can see this going to absurd lengths, where perhaps one day soon we will not even be able to study foreign languages or allowed to use chopsticks at Chinese restaurants unless we are of Chinese descent.
Another dot I am connecting is the hourly re-writing of history, i.e. the internet news articles and disappearing evidence of events, in real time, unless we take screen shots to prove that we did, indeed, hear and see what we heard and saw. This leads to mass confusion and dull thinking.
Now I see political correctness applied to the acknowledgement of gender differences, even if one is being inclusive and mentioning both genders in one breath. (though perhaps if we can erase the gender boundaries sufficiently, we will not be able to apply the accusation, “cultural appropriation!” to those women who dress as men, and vice versa)
I see how this works, now: The absurdity is pushed beyond the point of absurdity, to the point of jaw-dropping dumbfoundedness, which is taken as tacit consent, so that even more absurdity is piled on. At a certain point, one’s head is spinning around so fast, up is down, inside is outside, wrong is right, it just gets weirder and more nightmarish, and people forget what yesterday was like, in order to appreciate how different today now is. A disturbingly large number of people are acquiescing to this nonsense. It’s totally crazy.
The first thing I ever saw disappear of the Internet that really struck me was a photograph from the 7/7 London bombings. It was the floor of the carriage blown upwards and was obviously from an explosion underneath the carriage. I searched long and hard and never saw it again.
It was originally on a UK newspapers website (cannot remember which one).