Swedish School’s Big Lesson Begins With Dropping Personal PronounsHere's the opening:
At an ocher-color preschool along a lane in Stockholm’s Old Town, the teachers avoid the pronouns “him” and “her,” instead calling their 115 toddlers simply “friends.” Masculine and feminine references are taboo, often replaced by the pronoun “hen,” an artificial and genderless word that most Swedes avoid but is popular in some gay and feminist circles.So, it's not about DROPPING personal pronouns, but rather avoiding gendered language. We've talked about epicene pronouns before (e.g. here), and other linguablogs have too.
Here's my question: Is this the clearest institutional endorsement of the phenomenon? I'm not recalling anything quite like it offhand. You could actually end up with kids using such forms pretty much natively, I suppose.