UK: Ratty feminist head-teacher advises cross-dressing

It's only people who need to claim that they are wiser than anyone else who go into this BS.  For over 10 years I have been taking brunch at a nearby cafe that is much frequented by mothers with young children.  And only once in that time have I ever seen an ambiguously dressed child.  It's normally pink for girls and blue for boys.  And of course dresses and frills for the girls and some sort of plain pants for the boys. 

And it's what the kids themselves want.  A little girl who wants a Princess dress will normally not be denied.  Children are quite fussy about their clothes from very early on.  My son would carefully select his shorts when he was 2.  I have said more about such "stereotypes" here and here


The headmistress of a £33,000-a-year girls' boarding school has called for parents to bring up their children in a 'gender neutral' way so that youngsters can try out 'male' and 'female' roles.

Heathfield school's Jo Heywood believes one of the benefits of gender neutral parenting is that it would produce girls confident about entering careers such as science and engineering, traditionally regarded as a man's world.

Princess Alexandra, the actress Sienna Miller and the model Amber Le Bon, daughter of Duran Duran's Simon, are among the famous alumni of the school in Ascot, Berkshire.

Ms Heywood told Sian Griffiths of The Sunday Times: 'If a little boy wants to explore wearing a princess dress and a little girl wants to spend time in a fireman's outfit, then that is to be encouraged ... Have girlie make-up, but let boys have it too.'

The mother-of-three added: 'Girls and boys should be allowed to explore roles traditionally associated with the opposite sex.'

Ms Heywood said her three daughters had a dressing-up box that contained firemen's outfits as well as princess dresses.

It also includes clothes she bought from a Swedish company that boasts of 'challenging gender roles'.

Ms Heywood's comments came after Adele was pictured allowing her three-year-old son to wear the princess outfit from hugely popular film Frozen during a trip to Disneyland.

Other mothers then posted pictures of their sons dressed in frilly dresses on Twitter in response to the singer's stance.

Meanwhile, a survey for the parenting website Channelmum.com has revealed that three out of five parents believe gender labels put on clothes and toys by retailers should be scrapped.

More than 2,000 mothers were surveyed, a quarter of which also wanted gender neutral school uniforms.

It was also revealed that two out of five mothers under the age of 30 now parent in a gender neutral manner, in comparison with just one in four older mothers.

The concept of gender neutral parenting first became popular among feminists in America during the 1970s, when it inspired the actress Marlo Thomas to write a best-selling children’s book called Free To Be… You and Me.

Recently, it has experienced a small revival.

In 2011, a Canadian couple made headlines after refusing to reveal the gender of their new-born child Storm in what they called ‘a tribute to freedom and choice’.

The following year, a Cambridgeshire couple, Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper, revealed they were raising their child Sasha as gender neutral to allow his or her ‘real personality’ to shine through.

SOURCE 






"Wellness" education

Good if it works. The nutrition advice is sure to be hokum

The University of Vermont has long had a reputation as a party school, perhaps the legacy of work-hard, play-hard students who liked to hit the slopes as well as the books.

But now, led by a medical school professor who totes a brain-shaped football to class, the university is expanding a dormitory program where drugs and alcohol are out and round-the-clock incentives for healthy living are in.
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The first-year project, called the Wellness Environment, includes 120 freshmen chosen from three times that number of applicants. Because of its popularity, the program will nearly quadruple next academic year and move to a second residence hall.

“If they can get really good health habits now, we’ve done our job,” said Annie Stevens, vice provost for student affairs.

Substance-free dorms have existed for decades, but the UVM project targets more than the dangers and distractions of binge drinking and excess partying. It’s a pioneering approach, which the university believes is the first in the nation, that includes a mandatory neuroscience class, meditation, nutrition coaches, and personal trainers to steer students toward a lifetime of healthy choices.

The force behind the Wellness Environment is Dr. James Hudziak, who put theory into practice when his daughter, now a sophomore, enrolled at the university.

“As I was doing all this health promotion work for children, in some ways I was duty-bound to test these ideas,” said Hudziak, an affable bear of a man who is chief of child psychiatry at the College of Medicine and the UVM Medical Center.

Those ideas led him to propose a university community where a simple mantra of “no alcohol, no drugs” would be supplemented by four pillars of the Wellness project — exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, and mentorship.

Mindfulness includes yoga and meditation, for example. The mentoring portion, which Hudziak calls “paying back,” will match Wellness students with Burlington youths.

Taken together, the plan uses healthy habits to build healthy brains, which should lead to healthier decisions. Officials say the concept already is drawing attention from Georgetown, Tulane, and Virginia Commonwealth universities.

The concept is admittedly simple — preparing students to be more than learners — but it’s one that has lagged in application, Hudziak said. Traditionally, parents have sent their children off to college with the confidence that they possessed enough judgment, after a bit of trial and error, to make the right decisions.

“We’ve thought they would make the best decisions themselves, and that’s not enough,” Stevens said. “You add alcohol and drugs to that mix, and it means they are not going to be successful.” So far, two students in the program have been removed from the substance-free dorm for violating the rules.

But that’s the rare exception. Overwhelmingly, students have bought into the Wellness effort.

Allen Vance, 18, of Hadley, Mass., said Hudziak’s off-beat recruitment pitch helped steer him to the program.

“He threw a football at me, basically, and handed me a flier,” Vance, a varsity runner, said in the dorm. “I can come back here and know there won’t be a distraction.”

Minutes later, Vance was off to the dorm’s gym, where trainers were available to coach students in the program. As he lifted weights, Vance joked with Caroline Duksta, a 19-year-old freshman from Rhode Island who is on the sailing team.

“I needed to be here, and I was aggressive about it,” said Duksta, who cherishes the comfort of a like-minded community. In some other residence halls, she said, “I hear the stories: Oh, my roommate was up playing beer-bong until 3 in the morning on a Tuesday.”

In Hudziak’s world — one of complex and arcane brain science — most college students are comparable to “supercharged race cars with no brakes.” Because the brain at that age has not developed fully, Hudziak said, students are vulnerable to making bad choices — over and over and over.

The result is often a recipe for trouble. “You’re sending someone off to college, and his regulatory system is not yet organized,” Hudziak said.

Hudziak approaches his job with the zeal of an evangelist. Before his class on “Healthy Brains, Healthy Bodies,” required for all Wellness students, he loosens up his acolytes by tossing a small football molded to look like a brain.

The class begins and ends with short meditation sessions — “How else do you get 100-plus kids to close their eyes on purpose?” Hudziak asked.

Leading researchers, shown on a large screen, often speak directly to the students through Skype. Hudziak displays scans of brains that have benefited from exercise and nutrition, and brains that have been damaged by drugs and alcohol. He also brings students to the neuroanatomy lab -- the class has access to the medical school’s facilities — and lets them see and handle human brains.

Over time, Hudziak said, the paradigm might mean fewer dropouts and fewer troubled students who need services.

“If I can have these college kids be in better emotional and behavioral health, that should result in a return on investment,” Hudziak said. In the fall, most of the Wellness freshmen will continue as sophomores.

Stevens, the vice provost, said the university has seen an 11 percent decline in self-reported drinking in the last four years, but that marijuana continues to be a challenge. With Vermont legislators considering whether to legalize the drug, the need for responsible marijauna use becomes more important for university leaders.

This spring, the Wellness group plans to make a statement about alternatives to alcohol and drugs, said Breanna Pletnick, the program coordinator and a 2015 graduate.

On April 20, an annual date when large numbers of UVM students gather to smoke marijuana, the Wellness Environment is sponsoring a 5-kilometer run and walk.

The run will start within yards of where many smokers are expected, Pletnick said, and will be a statement as well as an alternative.

“Students will see that, and realize there are students who are making other choices.”

SOURCE 






After Cecil Rhodes, it's Alcock the rooster: Students call for bronze cockerel to be sent back to Africa

Students have called for a bronze statue adorning a Cambridge college to be returned to Nigeria after it was looted from the country in the 19th Century.

In a row similar to the furore that has engulfed Oxford's Oriel College, students at Jesus College, Cambridge have voted in favour of telling their master the statue should be returned.

The cockerel statue is a Nigerian Benin Bronze, of which more than 2,000 sit in museums and collections across the globe.

But Nigeria itself has only 50 pieces of the artworks and the statue remains in the college's dining hall despite the country's requests for the bronzes to be returned.

It was given to the college as a reference to the surname of founder John Alcock, the bishop and architect who constructed the college.

One student described the row as the 'new Cecil Rhodes', in a reference to a campaign to remove a controversial statue of the tycoon from an Oxford college, The Sunday Times reported.

A spokesperson for Jesus College told the paper: 'Recognising that ethical issues are of great importance, Jesus College has structures in place through which these matters can be raised by its members.

'The request by students is being considered within these processes.'

Meanwhile, campaigners at Oriel College, Oxford have said they will redouble efforts to remove the statue of Rhodes, warning that it is critical for the institution to 'reckon with its past'.

The Rhodes Must Fall In Oxford group also accused Oriel College of 'selling out' by deciding to keep the statue before a consultation had taken place.

The governing body of the college announced last month it had decided following 'careful consideration' to keep the statue after receiving an 'overwhelming' amount of support to do so.

SOURCE