Prejudice

There is much to say about prejudice. One thing we know is that prejudice is a learned behavior. Children are born innocent; they don’t discriminate against skin color. For example, they don’t care if a person is white, black or even green like the little monsters they see in their books. It’s important to help children move from innocence to adulthood and not let them practice stereotyping during this process. Moral education is something parents should teach and teachers should support, even though many schools don’t offer this subject anymore in their curriculum. One way of doing this is to encourage children to try to see life through other people’s eyes. A famous exercise was created by Jane Elliott, a school teacher and anti-racist activist, during Segregation in the United States. Known as “blue-eyed/brown-eyed” exercise, it showed the children in her class how it felt to be treated the way a black person was treated. The exercise had a positive impact on the children’s attitudes towards all their classmates. In conclusion, to treat others with sympathy and try to understand other people is an everyday exercise that can help children grow without prejudices.

This was the experiment she did at class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeK759FF84s