Boys and girls

Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade boys make pizza dough for Friday lunch.

The Free School can seem like a haven of gender nonconformity.  Every day I am struck by small moments that would be met with teasing or ostracism elsewhere.  Sometimes I see it in what kids do - boys cook, girls learn to build wilderness shelters and climb trees.  Sometimes I see it in how kids look - fashion choices can be individual and everyone accepts that - anyone can wear long hair or pink.  We never walk in two lines down the hall, boys on one side and girls on the other, as we did at my old school.

More importantly, our community allows and supports emotional expressions that kids elsewhere are conditioned to shut off as they grow older.  Two boys can sit side-by-side on the couch.  Hugging nad crying are accepted.  An older boy lends his gym shoes to a younger one.  These are ordinary human things that happen and every time I am surprised, it reminds me of how tough and how cruel the schools where I used to work could be.  In a place where affection is more unconditional, the kids here have a lot less to prove.

But I still see gender roles playing out.  I still see mostly girls with dolls and mostly boys wearing red and blue. I see council meetings where the boys all sit on one side of the room and the girls on the other.  Expectations about gender expression are some of the most ubiquitous foundations of identity in our society - kids get ideas about how to be a boy and how to be a girl everywhere.  And the world tells them that only by being a boy or a girl successfully can they be a person successfully.  And it is easy to imagine that we are having some sort of utopian moment here at school, but in fact the world pokes its head in all the time.