New Study Warns Teachers Against Saying 'Boys Will Be Boys'
A new study slams preschool teachers as contributing to gender inequality through the different ways in which they discipline boys and girls.
The study “Push-Ups Versus Clean-Up: Preschool Teachers’ Gendered Beliefs, Expectations for Behavior, and Disciplinary Practices” was written by Heidi M. Gansen of the University of Micigan and published in a journal called “Sex Roles,” PJ Media reported.
In the study’s abstract, she wrote that “teachers discipline boys and girls differently and create gendered stories about why these differences exist.”
She blamed those differences on the teachers’ beliefs about gender differences.
“I argue that teachers’ gendered beliefs and gendered disciplinary interactions with children in preschool classrooms contribute to the embodiment and enforcement of gender and gender inequality in early childhood,” she wrote.
To that end, one teacher was ruled out of bounds for telling Gansen that “boys will be boys.”
Beliefs like that are a way “through which an unequal gender system is reproduced because interactions between teachers and students organize and define boys and girls differently,” Gansen wrote.
Gansen said re-education is called for.
“Perhaps if we change preschool teachers’ gendered expectations for boys’ and girls’ behaviors this will spark a change… and better allow for the possibility of children’s individual identities to be shaped differently,” she wrote.
Sweden is embracing the concept in two gender-neutral preschools, CNN reported, in which gender terms are not used and all pupils are referred to by a unisex pronoun.
However, psychiatrist David Eberhard said the effort is “blind to biological differences.”
“This is the kind of brainwash that works when the kids are small and in the short run they adapt to this, but what happens when they go to normal school and they find out they were living in a sect?” he said.
“This is a sort of a religious sect to say there’s no differences between men and women, it has nothing to do with science,” he added.
Gansen is no stranger to research about preschools. In 2017, she published a study bemoaning “heteronormativity” in preschools, which means boys assume male roles and girls assume female ones.
That study was attacked by conservative commentator Corey Stallings on Louder With Crowder.
“There is a college professor who claims preschools are too heteronormative. Meaning, preschools aren’t gay or trans enough for leftists’ delicate sensibilities,” Stallings wrote.
“Boys being boys and girls being girls might be strange and ‘heteronormative’ in leftist-land. But, everywhere else, we have a word for that: normal,” he added.
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