Swedish school bans "him" and "her"

I suspect that is true....though, since we have no examples of children raised without the very powerful enculturation that begins from the instant of birth, ( I'm dead serious....adults relate VERY differently to boys and girls immediately) I don't think we know as much as we think we do, especially given brain plasticity.

I just think kids ought to be given as many choices about how they want to be and what interests they wish to pursue with as little pressure to be a particular way as we can manage.

Thats hard though, both because so much of what we do is not consciously apparent to us, and because there are lots of people out there who are ready to froth at the mouth, especially, in modern western culture right now, I think, about boys who don't observe rigid gender roles.

I think many of we western women are living with less gender role pressure, by and large (excluding those living in the thrall of various fundamentalist religions and such) than has ever been the case in history....though stuff like pressure to be skinny and all that kind of thing is still very strong. Were a pretty small percentage of women though.

We can infer more than you suggest that we know. For example, natural selection is going to choose women who are "nuturing" and men who are aggressive. At the same time, although to a lesser extent, it's going to choose women who are aggressive and men who are nuturing. It's going to favor groups which are cooperative and, at least within the group, altruistic. It might be more useful to see nuturing as a dominant trait in women, and recessive in men, and aggression as a dominant trait in men, and recessive in women.

Given that, I would think that a school policy that obscured gender differences would probably help boys catch up, or at least not fall further behind in academic performance.

If culture is responsible for the performance gap, then removing cultural expectations on boys and girls should eliminate it entirely. On the other hand, if the gap really is due to innate differences in learning ability, then it certainly does boys no good to constantly remind them of those differences. Either way, removing gender from the equation should help boys feel better about their chances in school.

Frankly, I believe we should take the same attitude towards learning disabilities. Rather than label people with this or that diagnosis, making them feel like outsiders, schools could list out kids' weak areas and consult manuals that might prescribe alternative forms of instruction to kids' with those specific weaknesses. I am currently working with a kid who was labelled with a learning disability. The label caused some people to lose faith that there could also be an upside to him. His mother sent him to me on a whim, because I know the grandmother; but now I'm convinced he has more mathematical talent than I ever had. (Note: this is a bizarre, anomalous case. The kid comes from a very academically-gifted family.)

most of those who are supporting the use of social coercion from the top down such as the Swedish education system effort to weaken gender roles in society dont care why the behavior that they dont approve of happens.......they believe that they can suppress what they dont like and that what ever portion is caused by genetics will over time (generations) be rewritten in the genes. These modern day holy rollers fully believe that the rightness of their ideology justifies their program of violence and oppression.