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Gender lessons learned from English textbooks
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.
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.
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*Thunders around stomping on things like Godzilla, who was also female what with the egg-laying and all.*
Raaaaawrg! Female ovary-induced ragesplooooosion!
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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=).