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British teachers told boys playing with imaginary weapons is good
Story here.
"Playing with toy weapons helps the development of young boys, according to new Government advice to nurseries and playgroups.
Staff have been told they must resist their "natural instinct" to stop boys using pretend weapons such as guns or light sabres in games with other toddlers.
Fantasy play involving weapons and superheroes allows healthy and safe risk-taking and can also make learning more appealing, says the guidance.
It conflicts with years of "political correctness" in nurseries and playgroups which has led to the banning of toy guns, action hero games and children pretending to fire "guns" using their fingers or Lego bricks.
But teachers' leaders insisted last night that guns "symbolise aggression" and said many nurseries and playgroups would ignore the change."
Hat tip to Dan Gifford....
Comments
Well, DUH. Welcome aboard, experts.
Posted by: Don Gwinn at December 30, 2007 03:17 PM
The Muslims in their midst are starting to make the thinking Brits nervous. Better get the next generation ready for war.
Posted by: Letalis Maximus, Esq. at December 30, 2007 04:22 PM
Maybe they asked a school teacher. Or a parent.
Posted by: Don Gwinn at December 31, 2007 11:08 AM
Funny how it takes a lot of money and a truckload of "experts" to figure out what the rest of us knew years ago...
Posted by: BobG at December 31, 2007 12:00 PM
Funnier how liberals love the advice from the "experts" when it involves our planet getting 1.7 degrees warmer in 100 years, but ignore it when it involves letting kids play with toy guns. The horror!
Posted by: Jim at December 31, 2007 01:31 PM
Perhaps the scariest bit of the report is its inadvertent admission that the overwhelmingly female staff ruling over "nurseries and playgroups" has a "'natural instinct' to stop boys". Sheesh!
BobG is spot on about the money and a truckload of experts. As former US Secretary of Education Bill Bennett once admitted, "A 'social study' is the elaborate demonstration of the obvious by methods that are obscure."
Something else the rest of us knew years ago is that children, especially boys but girls too, need the presence of men in order to grow up properly. What's happened in the over-feminized Anglosphere is that men have been denigrated and swept out of the everyday lives of children. The damaging effects of mother-only child raising are already well understood, even the 'experts' are starting to recognize the mother-only household as a spawning ground of delinquency, teen pregnancy, and violent criminals (of both sexes). Now the 'experts' are starting to wake up to the damage that female-only staffed child minding centres do to a child's growing mental and moral capacities.
In his book Good Will Toward Men author and former middle-school teacher Jack Kammer observed, "Women have day care where they all sit in one place and they all do the sedentary things. A male style of day care would probably require four acres." (St. Martin's Press, 1994; new 2007 paperback edition available at www.lulu.com/content/955619) Now that the 'experts' have ruled that a boy's make-believe gun is healthy for him, let's move on to giving that boy his necessary four acres.
Posted by: michael i at December 31, 2007 05:10 PM