Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin
This fad will pass eventually, I hope. But in the meantime a lot of children will be confused.
+JMJ+
OK, this is scary. Anybody else notice that friend sounds awfully communist? Does comrade ring a bell?
Forcing the poor kids to be something they’re not is only going to have negative results. I’ll bet they’re frustrated right now.
I’m wary of exaggerated media reports about allegedly mad schools, so it seemed only fair to look at the school’s own website as a (google translated) primary source
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sodermalmsforskolor.se%2Fegalia%2Fextern%2Fgenuspolicy.htm
We try to use gender-neutral words or proper names, thus reducing the amount of gender expression. In everyday speech we use rather “Alfred” and “Elin’s” instead of “his” and “her”. We do not cry “Come on guys / girls” but prefer to use gender-neutral words like “Friends”, and proper names.
We write and say rather ‘parent’ and ‘parents’ and parent’s name instead of limiting ourselves to the heterosexual norm, “mother” and “dad”. On Egalia we play like “mother, father, child” as well as “daddy, daddy, baby,” “Mother, mother, child” or “Dad, dad, sister, aunt, child.”
We use children’s literature that includes adoptive and donor families, parents of the same gender and families where the parents separated and / or are single.
…
All children should be offered the same technical, logical and physical challenges and games, and all children have the opportunity to practice empathic abilities, such as prudence, kindness and care. We educators shows itself in our daily work that gender does not have any bearing on who is baking, carpentry, cleaning, washing up, comforting, or dancing.
As far as I can see this school is not trying to abolish gender – they have anatomically correct dolls. The controversial element seems to be introducing LGBT concepts to young children.
I don’t know any Swedish, so I can’t say how natural or confusing their linguistic efforts are. Gender inclusive language only goes so far. Latin and many other languages have many gender inclusive terms, but Roman society was not gender equal! I find little correlation between inclusive language and economic gender equality.
+J.M.J+
My son has a speech delay and as a result is having trouble with pronouns. He’s older than preschool yet still sometimes refers to female as “he” or even “it” and must be corrected. It strikes me that a school like this would be very unhelpful for a child like him. How could such a child learn the proper use of pronouns if they are never modeled for him (or her)?
Leo, when you run the site through Google Translate, it ceases to be a primary source. Do not base your judgment on that pseudo-English mess. Swedish is my first language, and this is much worse than you think. I’m ashamed of being a Swede now. Seriously… this would be hilarious if it wasn’t for real.
Maybe we could start by ceasing the incorrect use of the word “gender”?
Dear Ike from Sweden
I agree with you about primary sources and machine translation – I thought my phrase “(google translated) primary source” made this clear. Never mind.
I was hoping that a Swedish speaker or two would be able to comment on the accuracy of the google translation as far as the ‘charges’ are concerned. As a native Swedish speaker perhaps you would be good enough to give us some better translated examples from the school website to illustrate how “this is much worse than you think” – maybe properly translating appropriate parts of the passages I quoted.
Thanks
Dear Leo and everyone else,
sure, the translation does provide the basic gist, but there are always more or less intranslatable nuances in a text (I know some linguists would disagree with me on that, but that’s beside the point). Anyway, I’ve read the site as well as articles and interviews, which Egalia have not distanced themselves from. They did sue the racist website Nationell.nu for defamation, but only because of their (as always) nasty way of expressing themselves. It seems that Egalia have not challenged the site’s factual claims. So, after reading various stuff across the political spectrum, including the preschool’s site, the story seems to be this:
1. They haven’t actually, literally banned “han” (“he”) and “hon” (“she”), but prefer to use the combination “hen” (eww). And they do refuse to use the words “boy” and “girl”. They claim that they “do not want to hide the biological gender”, but that is nonsense as far as I can tell. Either there are two genders, with visible AND invisible differences, or there aren’t.
2. They nearly exclusively read stories with LGBT themes, because “the kids will get the hetero family books from somewhere else anyway” (my translation, and they actually used the word “hetero”). They have not, as far as I can see, challenged the claim that they believe “traditional” fairy tales (like “Snow White”) to be “patriarchal”.
Whew, that sure was a lot of text. I apologize for any typos. Will write more later. Cheers,
Ike