Perplexed Purple Penguins

           Growing up, “Ladies and Gentlemen” “Boys and Girls” were familiar phrases in my elementary school classroom.  In a Nebraska school district teachers are no longer allowed to refer to their students by their gender, but must refer to them as “Purple Penguins.”  They can no longer have a girls and boys line, but they must line up, for example, by which fruit they prefer apples or bananas.  Teachers must not say or do anything that references a student’s gender.  In the document to the teachers it states, “Always ask yourself . . . ‘Will this configuration create a gendered space?”  Teachers must also have an all gender welcoming classroom.   The point of this is to, “provide education, training and support to help create a gender sensitive and inclusive environment for children of all ages.”

            The instructions for this new policy even go further.  If a teacher hears a child referring to “girls and boys” in a gender specific way, they must interrupt the student so they can learn it is an incorrect statement.  Teachers should ask, “What makes you say that? I think of it a little differently.  Then they should, provide counter-narratives that challenge students to think more expansively about their notions of gender.”  Why is it wrong to refer to someone as a girl or boy, when that is the way God made us?  Why does everybody have to participate in the gender neutral act when there are only a few people who are gender neutral?”   

            At my elementary school each grade would line up in two lines one for girls and the other for boys.  The teachers always referred to us as girls and boys, and when we went to church we had to sit in a boy- girl, boy-girl order.  At recess we played games together where kids played male and female roles.  When we would play games during physical education, our teams would always be the boys’ verses the girls’.  For my first nine years of school I attended a Catholic School, so of course the whole gender neutral concept would not go over to well.  The Catholic Catechism clearly states “Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity.  Physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity are oriented toward the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life. The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the sexes are lived out.”  I can not imagine growing up where I was never referred to as a girl.  Instead of helping these children, I feel they are just confusing them.        

           

Based on: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389862/school-told-call-kids-purple-penguins-because-boys-and-girls-not-inclusive