Effective Anti-Bigotry Program - Use Schools, but Not Teachers

Human beings are not born with a set of social norms that allows them to perceive people belonging to racial, religious, or ethnical groups other than their own with disrespect, derision, or even hatred. These are acquired through upbringing, establishing for a person a sense of belonging to a social group, and depend heavily on the environment in which a person is reared. The older a person gets, the deeper this set of social norms becomes entrenched in one's psyche, especially if one's surroundings keep reinforcing it through images and interactions. This in turn means that any attempts to dispel various racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices associated with these established preconceptions are more likely to succeed if applied to persons at earlier ages. This is why, in my opinion, the goal of a large non-profit organization aimed at fighting racial, ethnical, and religious bigotry is to fund a program that educates young people about the fallacy of prejudicing against other people on such grounds. Since the most optimal educational results can be achieved in an atmosphere where education is already the primary point of daily activities, the program of this type should be administered through public and private schools in the form of regular special projects.

Determining at which age to begin applying such a program is equally important to making decisions regarding its contents. If delivered to a children who are too young to understand the underlying differences based on race, ethnicity, or religion, this program would not be effective because the persons at whom it is aimed simply would not understand the message it is trying to deliver. On the other hand, if aimed at high school students, such a program may encounter the already established elements of social separation norms on which such bigotry is based, while at the same time coming against the natural feeling of rebellion against authority that many teenagers experience, which makes them suspicious of any message delivered by the representatives of authority, of whom teachers and other educators are a part. This means that the optimal age group for the beginning of this program may be children entering middle school, which at the same time possesses basic understanding of differences based on religious, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, and lacks the sense of rebellion against authority that would make them reject any message delivered by a teacher or a special instructor.

Since it appears that regular school curricula are becoming increasingly politicized, with teachers' presentations of educational material becoming influenced by the teachers' own sociopolitical views, no program that would make anti-bigotry education part of the regular school curriculum - and thus utilized teachers as means of delivery of its message - should be funded. Instead, arrangements should be reached with each individual school to devote certain periods in each school day to educational seminars delivered and supervised by guest instructors specifically trained for this purpose. These seminars should be structured in such a manner as to be not simply one-sided information delivery from instructor to students, but also active workshops in which students would be encouraged to participate actively by asking questions and interacting with one another to learn more about their peers' social background. To add authority and strengthen the message, an arrangement can be made with various celebrity figures to become 'instructors for a day.'

The program described above appears to be the worthiest of many available designed to fight ethnical, racial, and religious bigotry because it delivers the message of tolerance and understanding to the minds pliable enough to accept it, and in the form that gets the students themselves involved in the educational process.