Perhaps tellingly, the incident at Rye College – a Church of England school – happened at the end of a class on “life education” in which children were told by their teacher that there were lots of genders, including “agender – people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.Īn argument ensued in which two pupils disagreed with the teacher, saying there was no such thing as agender, because “if you have a vagina, you’re a girl and if you have a penis, you’re a boy – that’s it”. Some of them, such as tales of schools providing litter trays to cater for children identifying as cats, have turned out to be hoaxes, which has made it all too easy to assume that the problem is either a myth or is wildly exaggerated.īut it is not difficult to find genuine examples of children in UK schools insisting on being addressed as animals, raising two important questions: why is it happening, and how should teachers respond? Stories about children self-identifying as animals – sometimes referred to as “furries” – have been circulating for some time. Another wears a cape and wants to be acknowledged as a moon. At another secondary school in England, a pupil insists on identifying as a horse. The Telegraph has discovered that a pupil at a secondary school in the South West is insisting on being addressed as a dinosaur. Inquiries by this newspaper have established that other children at other schools are also identifying as animals, and the responses of parents suggest that the schools in question are hopelessly out of their depth on the question of how to handle the pupils’ behaviour. The incident at Rye College, first reported by The Daily Telegraph yesterday, was not a one-off. The Year 8 pupils were told they would be reported to a senior leader after their teacher said they had “really upset” the fellow pupil by telling them: “You’re a girl.” Difficult as it may be to believe, children at a school in East Sussex were reprimanded last week for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat.
0 kommentar(er)
