Good for the Goose, Gander & Gosling
An old rule of thumb of folk wisdom that I have adopted wholeheartedly is that, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander”. I wouldn’t call this conventional wisdom, since applied to folks rather than fowl it challenges the path of least resistance of the patriarchal thread still strongly woven through our cultural trajectory. But I would recommend it as a simple metric for implementing the Golden Rule and promoting a society based on partnership rather than patriarchy.
A simple application of this rule, but metaphorically powerful I think in challenging male supremacy, is the logic of opening doors for other people. When I come to a doorway in a store or at my work just before another man I open the door for him, since I would do so for a woman. Conversely, if a woman gets to the door just before me I am comfortable letting them open it for me, since if the situation were reversed, I would be comfortable opening the door for her.
Now of course, with either gender, there is an acknowledgment of diminished capacity, even if temporary, that factors in to this social etiquette. I might make the effort to move ahead of that person closer to the door to open it if they had their hands full or appeared elderly and with limited mobility, or a small child who might not have the strength to open the door themselves.
In traditional (patriarchal) practice, men go out of their way to open doors for a woman but not for a man. Opening a door for a woman is an acknowledgment of and deference to her “privileged” status of being under the care and protection of men. Opening a door for a man, if he doesn’t have his hands full or is maybe elderly and infirm, could be taken in this traditional perspective as a sign of disrespect, treating another male not as a peer but like a woman.
I think it is very interesting to watch how people behave in public settings at doorways regarding who opens for whom and when the person holding the door open passes that task on to someone else. The observed behavior says a lot about the assumptions of status.
Sometimes I see a family with mom, dad, daughter and son approaching the door. The son opens the door and the daughter and mom go through. The dad hangs back to signal that his son, who behaved appropriately by holding the door for the women-folk, should now pass the task to the dad to hold the door while his son now passes through the doorway. Finally the dad (in my take having demonstrated his status as head of family and protector of the others) passes through the doorway himself, the order of things and the status of people within their roles having been acknowledged and preserved.
So am I reading too much into this? Try this observational exercise yourself and then give me your answer.
Beside the dynamic of gender between adults, which can vary from person to person and family to family, it is also interesting to observe the dynamic of age, particularly between adult and youth. At what age is the youth likely to have a parent or other adult open the door for them versus an expectation that the youth the door for themselves or (particularly if male) for someone else.
This leads to an interesting corollary to the goose/gander rule of thumb and application of the Golden Rule which I have more recently adopted, which is, “What’s good for the goose and gander is good for the gosling”. If I would treat an adult a certain way (to show due respect) in a given situation, I try to treat a youth the same way in a similar situation. Conversely, if I am tempted to assist a youth with something, I make sure I would also be comfortable assisting an adult with the same thing.
Prior to adopting this rule, if I saw a child of say five stretching to reach an item on a grocery store shelf, I might as an adult, without asking, help them complete the task. But in the same situation with a fully functional adult I would never be so presumptuous to offer that help without asking if they needed assistance first. Having now adopted the rule, I would ask the child as well before giving assistance. No big deal perhaps.
But what about applying this “gosling corollary” to education? Say I see our same five-year-old is holding an empty cup and appears tall enough to employ but still confounded by the machine that will dispense ice and soft drink into that cup. Before I might have walked up to the child and immediately instructed them on how to fill their cup with ice then soda, something I would never presume to do with an adult, gauging it as the height of disrespect. Now I would ask the child first, “Do you need help?” and offer the instruction only after an affirmative answer.
I think youth and adults need to respect each other and understand that we are not fundamentally different from each other. Keeping that in mind, I think we adults need this sort of rule of thumb to help us decide what is appropriate in working with kids and specifically helping them learn.
Now maybe the strictest reading of this rule of thumb does not take into account the different developmental needs of humans at different ages, so I try to factor in some exceptions for what is developmentally appropriate. But I don’t think it is any more developmentally appropriate to instruct a person of five unsolicited than it is to do the same with a person of fifty. Both the five-year-old and the fifty-year-old are wrestling with autonomy and agency within the context of community.
