Top Swiss teacher calls for gender guidelines from politicians

The gender star in action. Keystone-SDA

Politicians should dictate how Swiss schools deal with gender-appropriate language, says Dagmar Rösler, president of the Swiss Federation of Teachers.

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In an interview with the online portal Blick.ch published on Sunday, Switzerland’s top teacher says there needs to be a “joint commitment at a political level on how gender-appropriate language should be handled in future”.

Rösler said schools are currently alone in all the debates and recommendations – or non-recommendations. They find themselves in the firing line when they tackle the problem themselves, she said.

Nobody really wants to disclose how schools should deal with special characters or gender-appropriate language, Rösler said. Apart from politicians, neither does the German Spelling Council, according to Rösler.

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Rösler does not believe that it is a problem for children and young people to learn how to use the gender starExternal link, for example, at school. “Teachers are trained to explain precisely such issues.” But there is a lack of a “climbing rope that we can hold on to”.

Spelling Council

In July the German Spelling Council said in a statement that internal word characters such as the colon and the asterisk are not part of the core of German orthography. The subsequent problems cannot be sufficiently assessed, it said, adding that the development must continue to be monitored.

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Special characters within words impair the comprehensibility and automatic translatability of texts. They cannot currently be clearly justified scientifically and could not be included in the official rules of German jurisdiction, it said.

According to the Council, this set of rules is binding for schools and administrations in the German-speaking regions of Switzerland and its neighbouring countries.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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