Writing Assignment Two
People are products of their environment. They pick up on the prejudices and tolerances of their parents, the media and their peers, as these are the main sources of social learning.
Prejudice is not inherent, but learned, and is acquired primarily through ones parents. Your parents are your first teachers in all things, especially social norms. Children want to be just like their parents from a very young age, and when parents demonstrate hatred their kids don’t miss a beat. You first learn right and wrong from your parents, mimicking their views from infancy, no matter how intolerant they are. Your parents are your primary teachers but when you grow up enough to leave the shelter of your home, different sources affect your tolerances.
The media is perhaps the most heavy-handed source of learning in the world. Every source from news media to radio advertising reinforces and plays off of the prejudices you have already learned. All you have to do is open a magazine and flip for seconds before you see some kind of racial, gender or socio-economic stereotype. What’s worse is that the media is where kids go to see “what’s cool,” actively seeking out the norms taught without any knowledge of their effect. Pop culture as shown by the media is the primary source for trends or styles that children will follow unquestioningly to gain self-confidence and peer acceptance, regardless of how intolerant they may be.
A child’s peers are the group that a kid wants acceptance from the most, and if that means supporting stereotypes or racism, it can often be hard for a child to resist. Friends and role models can often have a more subversive effect to the children of tolerant parents because they are the products of their environments as well. Kids learn how to interact in the world when they are playing, but this can teach intolerance when they are pressured to be intolerant by their playmates.
It is clear that intolerance is learned and not inherent and teaching tolerance from an early age is of the utmost importance. Reforms need to be made to the media as well, to check the irresponsibly conceived information that is made inescapable today. When children are taught tolerance, they will grow up in a tolerant world.
