Pacoe, Bullying, And Schools

After reading Pascoe's book in class it made me really stop and think about how our schools are made to cultivate bullying and let it thrive instead of putting a stop to it. From a young age kids are split up by gender when moving from place to place, sitting in lunchrooms, and participating in chorus. Teachers and parents perceive this as fine until a kid comes a long that might not it exactly in one box or the other. With this the teacher just puts them in a box that will work best for the classroom, they rarely take into account what the child would like.
This type of school is problematic for many reasons. For one it makes children think that they can only be one or the other, they cant like barbies and the color pink if they are a boy, and if they are a girl they cant play with race cars and like blue. A second reason this is bad is because people are looking at boys and girls like they are exact and total opposites of each other, which they aren't. Have you ever heard of the punishment sitting boy-girl-boy-girl? In my elementary lunch room we were allowed to sit in our gender segregated table unless we misbehaved and if we did then we had to switch to boy-girl-boy-girl tables. Imagine how well this would play out if you didn't have a specified gender, elementary would be a nightmare.
I think if schools change a few things it would make it easier for kids to grow up with more gender freedom and help lower the bullying rate for kids who "don't fit in." To start, teachers can stop splitting up kids by gender when they walk places. Another thing is when writing name tags, or anything else designated to a certain child don't use the same color for all the boys and the same color for all the girls. doing those two things in a class room will help to break the stereo type that boys and girl are direct opposites and that they all like the same thing. Although these things are small it should help to make kids feels more inclusive.