Reducing Prejudice !!
There is two ways in which you can reduce prejudice within a society. These being social education and inter-group contact. The best way of social education is not through targeting attitudes at home but by enriching schools curriculum’s to enable children to be exposed to other viewpoints. A school that used this technique was Verona High School, New Jersey, USA. They introduced a programme that provided sufficient opportunity to discuss equality issues, to understand equality diversity represents challenges and opportunities for individuals and society as a whole and to align the specific area of instruction with equality issues. A study was carried out by Aronson et al (1978) which was also classroom based. The researchers believed that if a school has a competitive nature this would not allow the children within it to like and understand other children. They argued that rather than compete children should learn to cooperate in pursuit of common goals. They used the jigsaw technique where they gave each member of a group material they had to learn. With this task group members had to then interact with each other, learning their part and communicating it to others. The parts then combined to produce a whole.
