Gender lessons learned from English textbooks

[mothwing]

Oh, Greenline. I used to love you and I still think you're better than Cornelsen. Still, what on earth ARE you people thinking?

This is the supplementary material that people find on your homepage - a unit on what it's like, being a teenager, including ~voices of teens~ and their view on gendered and gender stereotyped hardships they have to deal with ("Girls are more supportive of each other", "girls are more superficial", "boys don't cry", "boys want sex").

This starts badly enough with this: 



Nice use of colour coding and of stereotypes, there. Also, how are teenagers even supposed to know whether they're "true" or "clichés"...? Scientists aren't sure about this, what good does it do to do a fact-free, gut-feeling based discussion on this? Then, at the end of the texts that follow and which aren't much better (well, the authors are young, I thought), there's this:



Now, Klett, Is this really what you want to teach your kids? These "facts"?

It's also fun that observations based on gender seems to be the only case left in which it's fine to use stereotypes as the basis for any discussion, and it's also not even encouraged to specifically look at differences between those social groups - it's been a while since students were encouraged to draw a table listing the differences between black and white people, for example.

Comments

[cranky--crocus.livejournal.com]

My comment: *headdesk.*

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Right? Though I suppose it's just our nature to be bitchy about these things. It are fact.

[cranky--crocus.livejournal.com]

MY OVARIES DEMAND I BITCH AND MOAN ABOUT THESE THINGS AND MAKE MOUNTAINS OUT OF THESE HERE MOLEHILLS!

*Thunders around stomping on things like Godzilla, who was also female what with the egg-laying and all.*

Raaaaawrg! Female ovary-induced ragesplooooosion!

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Female ovary-induced ragesplooooosion!
Oh, don't even get me started on the transphobia of it all - ONLY CIS PEOPLE EXIST NO ONE ELSE HAS ANY BUSINESS BEING INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK. Though the way they handled racism kinda makes me grateful that they didn't even try (they did have a lot of "Racism in the olden days" texts set in the nineteenth century, something about MLK, and then a text set in a High School that shows that reverse racism TOTALLY exists. D=).

[tetleythesecond]

Did you let the publisher know your opinion, too?

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Working on it. I'm not sure how to put it yet.

[tetleythesecond]

Cool! If you get around to it, and if you think that there might be strength in numbers, feel free to PM me the gist of your letter and I'll adapt it to fit a gender-conscious student aunt or something like that. I don't know enough about schoolbooks to trust myself to come up with something on my own, but I think I could manage something decent if prompted.

[dstroyrofworlds.livejournal.com]

Honestly, since I know so many young teachers and teaching students I feel I shall never get any children. This world is worse off than I had thought.
And, oddly enough, from all the examples you have given us over the past weeks I often thought when I saw the "boys behaviour/characteristics/etc" things like "I'd do that, too"/"I know that, too"/"I'm like that, too"/"Yeah, I'd want that, too"...

Am I a man? I prefer blue over anything resembling pink, have strict borders of supportiveness and I certainly want a lot of good and casual sex.
No. I am a normal woman. But I am also old enough to know who and how I am to a certain extent. At least the core is quite clear.
The children that are taught by that books however...



Anyway. So I shall be happy to use the self-proclaimed "freedom" of our time AND be bitchy. Höhöhö. I see myself getting on just fine.

[dstroyrofworlds.livejournal.com]

By the way: I don't think there was anything as odd as that in my Gree Lines. Could that be?

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Our books were definitely different and I think they were less gendered, too. At least my 1983's Greenline was. It did have gendered messages, but in the world of Barbara Klein and Ronnie Bennett, gender was definitely somewhat less stereotyped than it is today. At least they didn't have any colour codes. X_X

[dstroyrofworlds.livejournal.com]

Ronnie and Timmy and Kevin and Babara and her sister and Kate were all cool and had their very own troubles and strengthes - and everybody, regardless of gender, could relate to them.
Kate(?) hid on the rood of her family's traveling bus which was keen and cool and everybody liked it.
And Timmy got lost, so Ronnie was worried and cried and Kevin tried to help him, which was again something everybody could understand, especially if they had a smaller sibling.

I think it was better because gender neither mattered so much NOR(!) was so present overburdening all the time.
How things looked between your legs did not constitute so much. In most cases it actually did not matter at all.

Isn't it odd? We want our children to be freed from unnecessary gender borders and cliches and all we manage is an even stronger view on anything having to do with "the little difference".
How could one ever possibly learn to be free and just the way he or her is in such an atmosphere?
What that children learn is that their sex counts and that their gender constitutes their possibilities.

Excuse me but...BLEARGH. Makes me want to throw up.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Me, too. I think the problem is that they picked up on the notion that gender is an important issue and that there appears to be a lot of research on the subject, then ignored said research and went ahead and published their own stereotyped views of what gender is all about, reinforcing them in the process, it's a mess. The teachers who teach this pick up on this notion, the notion that research on this is trivial, anyway, and go with what their gut tells them is right about gender ("Women like shoes", an English learning poster done by our Abi-Jahrgang said, "Men like Sports". It got 15 points - the highest mark and left me feeling quite sick).

My only hope is that this stereotype reinforcing backlash ebbs off, soon, because all this very strong stereotyping seems to be rooted in panic for some.

How things looked between your legs did not constitute so much.
I get what you're saying, but that's a person's sex and another problem - German doesn't distinguish between sex and gender, even though that's two entirely different things, so many people, including text book authors, mix those up - in short, your sex is what people determined your genitalia make you, and gender is your social role, "what's in your head". Those two aren't connected and need to be treated differently, but most books fail catastrophically at that. X_x