A seventh-grade class at a middle school was assigned a simulation of ancient Greek society. Students got Greek names, learned to wear Greek clothes, built temples, represented city-states, staged short dramas, and participated in Olympic events. By most measures, an unusually creative history project. It also required the girls to demonstrate their “secondary position.” They couldn’t enter the classroom without a male escort. They were expected to clean up after the boys each day. Nico, who goes by @nicorette on TikTok, found out about it when her 13-year-old daughter came home from school and told her it had made her uncomfortable. Nico posted about it, and the video spread. @nicoxrette I will be talking to the school, the office was closed by the time my child got home from school. I’m honestly appalled. Who okayed this? #parents #middleschool #middleschoolers #socialstudies #classroom #teachers #ancientgreece #feminist #feminism #sexist #sexism #fyp #fypシ #fypviralシ #wwyd #thoughts ♬ original sound – nico “How would you feel if your 13-year-old daughter came home with a paper that said they wouldn’t be able to enter a classroom without a boy escort and would be required to pick up after them every day?” she asked. She was clear that she liked a lot of what the project was trying to do, like the Greek names, the costumes, and the intellectual discussions so that just made the subservience requirement harder to explain away. “So why was this even necessary?” she asked. Middle school students working quietly. Photo credit: Canva The comments split in predictable directions but a few stood out. One viewer defended the assignment, arguing it could help female students understand how far women’s rights have come and how quickly they can erode. A commenter who identified as a teacher pushed back harder: “I wrote my master’s thesis about classroom simulations. They only work if the power dynamics stay equal among students.” Another drew a sharper comparison: requiring girls to perform submission to boys isn’t meaningfully different from asking Black students to perform submission to white ones. That last analogy tends to clarify things pretty quickly. The goal of a history simulation is to understand the past, not to rehearse it on the bodies of kids who are still figuring out who they are. Nico said the school office was closed by the time her daughter got home. She was planning to raise it with administrators the next day. You can follow Nico at @nicorette on TikTok for more parenting content. The post A middle school Greek history simulation asked girls to act subservient to boys for weeks. One mom asked a simple question: was this necessary? appeared first on Upworthy.