By Richard Littlejohn: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. We had that rhyme drummed into us from an early age.
It was designed to teach generations of children to ignore name-calling in the playground.
It was designed to teach generations of children to ignore name-calling in the playground.
Actually, it’s not strictly true. Verbal abuse can be hurtful. Learning to cope with it is part of growing up.
Kids have teased each other, often cruelly, since time immemorial. When I was a boy, I had friends who answered to Spot (acne), Lank (tallest in the class), Torch (red hair), Pig (flat nose, flared nostrils) and Mole (swot, bottle-top National Health specs).
Nicknames have always been common currency. But whenever teasing and taunting escalated into outright bullying, you could rely on parents or teachers to intervene and have a quiet word. Or, in the case of my old headmaster, a rather loud word.
But there’s a world of difference between a stern ticking off and the kind of obsessive policing of speech and behaviour imposed on children as young as five today. They’re even being told they mustn’t use words like ‘cissy’.
These days, calling a boy a ‘big girl’s blouse’ is tantamount to ‘hate crime’.
The Government has just issued official guidelines to schools on how to deal with suspected racist and sexist language.
Fair enough, no one should be discriminated against on the grounds of their skin colour or ethnic background. But the new rules go much further, introducing a regime worthy of the old East German Stasi.
Children are being trained to spy on each other and report any fellow pupil they consider guilty of ‘inappropriate’ language.
The guidelines are based on a pilot scheme at the Fairfield High School in Bristol, where deputy headmistress Janice Callow boasts that a group of volunteer girls have been assembled to spot sexist language.
She said: ‘We have always had clear policies on racist language, but now we are making it clear that any kind of sexist language is not acceptable.
‘We used to say “Man up, Cupcake”. We’ve stopped that. Saying “Don’t be a girl” to a boy if they are being a bit wet is also unacceptable.’
What? We used to say ‘Man up, Cupcake’? Who did?
I’ve never said, nor can recall anyone else saying: ‘Man up, Cupcake.’
Cupcake — and man up, for that matter — is a relatively recent introduction from America. On this side of the pond, we’ve always called them ‘fairy cakes’, though anyone using that expression now would be accused of ‘homophobia’.
Which bit of ‘Man up, Cupcake’ is considered offensive — Man up or Cupcake? I’m presuming it’s the Man up, given that the emphasis is on sexism. But how can telling a boy to ‘Man up’ be considered sexist?
Your guess is as good as mine. Mind you, we’re not infected with the warped mindset and Guardian-ista group-think which dominates the public sector. As the Mail asked yesterday: with our schools slipping to 20th in the world performance table, hasn’t the Government got anything better to do?
The justification for this madness is that it will challenge gender stereotyping in education.
Dame Barbara Stocking (a wonderful name for an academic), president of the female-only Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, said: ‘Girls who take physics are sometimes described as lesbians, and boys who take languages are called cissy.’
Are they? Are they really? Where’s the evidence?
Dame Blue-Stocking says gender stereotypes are ‘deeply ingrained in the British psyche’. Consequently, fewer girls study engineering here than in Europe or China. So what?
Girls are racing ahead in just about every other area, outstripping their male counterparts in university entrance and professions such as law and medicine — not to mention teaching.
Yet these self-pitying modern feminists wrap themselves in the cloak of discrimination and victimhood. I wonder what the original suffragettes would make of their constant whining.
The most sinister aspect of all this is the idea of pupils being encouraged to spy and sneak on each other. It is part of a disturbing trend towards politicising the playground.
What will happen to any child reported for calling someone a ‘cissy’? Will it go on his record, a black mark which will follow him throughout his education? Could it eventually harm his career prospects?
Every year tens of thousands of children, some as young as three, are branded bigots and put on a register for having committed hate crime simply because they called a fellow pupil ‘gay’ or some other epithet which has the Guardian-istas recoiling in mock outrage like a Victorian maiden aunt.
Half the time, kids don’t even know what they’re saying. When they are unnecessarily cruel, they can be corrected by a gentle admonishment. They shouldn’t be put on some kind of official blacklist.
And what about false accusations? Any girl who would volunteer to spy on her classmates is precisely the type capable of making up an allegation against someone she disliked — or, more likely, of whom she was jealous.
Whenever the Dame Barbara Stockings and Janice Callows of this world are tempted to scream ‘sexism’ at schoolchildren, they should remember that old nursery rhyme.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. Or, to put it another way:
Man up, Cupcake.
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