Human Prejudices: The Strategies for Reducing them in the Context of the Multicultural School
Abstract
Ordinary people, very frequently, build their opinions about other people based on information which they do not have or information which has little real ground. An example of this tendency are the human prejudices – convictions which we are always considered to be accurate, without approaching them in a critical manner and as such we receive them as finished products, in the way they have been served to us by the education, the family, the media, culture, etc. In this paper the subject of analysis are the prejudices and the strategies for reducing them with a special attention to the population of children and young people in the context of the multicultural school. In the introductory part we unveil the nature of prejudices through the prism of the theoretical views of the social psychology: a) The theory of behavior modeling; b) The theory of social identity; and c) The cognitive theory. Based on these views we place an emphasis on the limiting influence of the negative prejudices on the logical interpretation of the events and the people, as a potential source for multiethnic conflicts among the young. In accordance with the theoretical concepts, we finalize the contents of the paper, emphasizing the basic strategies for dealing with, i.e. reducing the prejudices in the students, with a special attention to: a) Intensifying the cooperation among the ones who are the subject of prejudices and the ones who have prejudices; b) Creating conditions for integrated education; c) Amendments of the educational and other institutional policies which render legitimate the division among the students; d) Providing information about the subjects of stereotypes as the most direct way of changing patterns through education; e) Creating conditions for equal pedagogy and f) Building a school – open culture towards diversity.
Keywords: Multiculturalism; prejudices and stereotypes; social identity; strategies for reducing prejudice; cognitive theory; equal pedagogy.
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