Good education ends not with a mandate but a suggestion

What to make of the Nebraska school district that purportedly told its teachers to stop using “gendered expressions” such as “boys and girls,” and instead use “gender inclusive” ones such as “purple penguins”? My colleague Janie Cheaney thinks that by next fall such gender-neutral weirdness will have shuffled into Nebraska history.

Maybe. The story was overblown, according to Brenda Leggiardo, the Lincoln Public Schools coordinator of social workers and counselors, who said the materials were only guidelines and suggestions. With many parents planning to show up at a school board meeting tomorrow night, Lincoln school superintendent Steve Joel did damage control: “Never once has anyone inside our system mandated that a teacher take [the words] ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ or ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ out of their interactions with children or interaction with adults.”

I suspect he’s telling the truth, but T.S. Eliot’s famous line, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” applies here. Miseducation begins not with mandates but with strategies to establish relationships, as in Joel’s comment: “This was about adults, professional educators, who care deeply about trying to reach and establish relationships with children. They are looking for strategies about how to be more effective in the classroom.”

Joel said he was proud of teachers and principals for not being afraid to ask questions. He did not say he was proud of one teacher who apparently passed on the handouts to a non-teacher. “Professional educators” apparently have the ability to transcend retro-questions concerning gender: “We’re not going to back away from educating ourselves on what it takes to be effective with children.”

Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, criticizes those who hurt transgender claimants “by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.” Our “professional educators” are now spreading the confusion, as are media leaders who sell the latest trend.

Janie is probably right about the sensibility of Nebraskans, but as long as trendy folks have authority, watch for purple penguins landing on the East and West coasts, and parachuting into some blue-dot cities in-between.