Tolerance

While finding other relevant information on tolerance, I came upon this website www.tolerance.org

I was chocked to read that we aquire predudices as early as 3 years of age. Luckily there are several ways of teahing tolerance to children, among others, by sharing common interests and goals in a community and thereby realyzing that even though we may be different in some areas we may also be the same. 

The following two paragraphs are from tolerance.org:

How do we learn prejudice? 
Social scientists believe children begin to acquire prejudices and stereotypes as toddlers. Many studies have shown that as early as age 3, children pick up terms of racial prejudice without really understanding their significance. Soon, they begin to form attachments to their own group and develop negative attitudes about other racial or ethnic groups, or the "out-group". Early in life, most children acquire a full set of biases that can be observed in verbal slurs, ethnic jokes and acts of discrimination.

Community matters. 
Integration, by itself, has not been shown to produce dramatic changes in attitudes and behavior. But many studies show when people work together in a structured environment to solve shared problems through community service, their attitudes about diversity can change dramatically. By including members of other groups in a task, children begin to think of themselves as part of a larger community in which everyone has skills and can contribute. Such experiences have been shown to improve attitudes across racial lines and between people old and young.

After reading these two paragraphs I realized that teaching tolerance in education is vital! It is the first step towards eliminating ignorance and prejudice. We live in a multi-cultural world and it is therefore of utter importance that we teach our students to be open minded and curious towards other people and cultures. We do not need to agree with others but we do need to be open and listen before we create our own opinions. Our teacher emphasized that if we cannot accommodate a situation there is a risk of seeking understanding through chauvinism, disgust and prejudice. We therefore need to keep on asking questions to get a better understanding of each other.

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Today we had a wonderful class regarding tolerance. Among others we learned a great activity our teacher, Marcus Baslev, called "the web". The foreign exchange students had to write one word on a piece of paper that explained what they thought was different in Denmark compared to their home country. Us Danes had to write one word that defined what we thought would be the most different compared to other countries.

I wrote “poverty” but the more I think of it I would rather have chosen the word “inequality”. We Danes have free education and free healthcare. We pay very high taxes but it is worth it. We live in a democratic society where human rights and sustainability is taken seriously. I know of many countries in the world where there is inequality and poverty and I therefore feel very privileged to live in this society. 

Then we all placed ourselves in a circle. The first person to read her choice of word explained the meaning of this word. This person was given a piece of string to hold on to. Then she had to choose another person in the group that had a somewhat similar word as to string the words together. The string was then passed on to this person who then explained his word and so on. At the end of our activity we had created a beautiful web that connected us.

This exercise can be used as an ice -breaker and also as a way to develop a common language. It could also be a good way to teach and approach tolerance by first finding similarities we have with people from another cultures, as this may bring us together on a common ground. Later we can discover and talk about our differences. We should ask questions to gain knowledge instead of staying ignorant and in worse case become prejudice against others.