I wrote my EdD some years ago on prejudice and the different ways that we might consider mitigating it through pedagogic strategies. It was a fascinating journey into the labyrinth of social psychology and neuroscience (here’s the publication if you’d like to go deeper). As my research deepened, it became clear to me that prejudice cannot be eradicated, only reduced, and with great difficulty at that.

What is it that causes prejudice? Well, there’s certainly no simple answer to that – as it means, literally, to prejudge a person, to make up your mind about them before knowing them, before giving them a chance and without deliberately controlling that impulse to judge. And often prejudice hardens too: we cherry pick evidence to reinforce the original position we have taken, to substantiate the judgement, discounting counter-evidence. Trying to undo all of that in our dense psychological framework is asking a lot.

One thing that researchers have known for decades, going all the way back to some of the first social experiments that were run just after WW2, is that when the context flares up (war, economic depression, political tension), fear sets in and, almost automatically, outgrouping increases, stereotypes are rekindled and prejudicial beliefs are exacerbated. When fear sets in, the amygdala – a subcortical “emotional brain” as it were, which regulates instinctive behaviours – plays a central and all-encompassing role in dominating thinking, pushing us into “fright or flight” or “reptilian brain” mode (these terms are layperson shorthand and are actually technically contested, but they will do for now by means of a short cut).

In short, the dark thunderclouds send us into panic and we react by minimising other people, casting them as friend or foe and, of course, this can lead to discrimination and worse. 

The next time someone attacks you, judges you, labels you, realise that they are probably acting, subconsciously, from a place of fear.

Hence, one of the core goals of an education is to help us become aware of the alarming ease with which we can lapse into prejudice and to equip us with the means to make intentional, metacognitively aware decisions that are counterintuitive, and cut against bias.

Rather than lapsing into the comfort of labelling other people, painting them as outgroup villains while wallowing in the warm illusion of belonging to a fictitiously homogenous ingroup; we have to train ourselves, as incommodious as it might be, to walk away from that intuitive prejudicial thinking and to turn to the more difficult work of reconsidering people as individuals and not as groups, listening to what is said and not judging because of who is saying it, and judging after, not before the fact. 

In fact, if education is to move to its highest force, so as to extend consciousness to cosmic, spiritual realms, this would mean not judging another person at all but seeking empathy and likeness. After all, in 99.5% of cases, we share the exact same DNA.

Easier said than done, but if there is one place where the higher and narrower road of compassion and understanding can be built, it is in the classroom. 

(Shoutout to Melanie Wasser for the photograph)