Giving Compass' Take:
- James Devitt reports that research shows that explaining inequality to children can reduce their bias against low-income groups.
- How can you support curriculum that gives children the historical and social context that they need?
- Read about the problem of banning lessons about race.
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Focus on structural origins of inequality can diminish biased views of others’ economic status among children, a study shows.
The work offers insights into the factors that affect how larger social issues are perceived at a young age and points to new ways to reduce bias toward lower-status economic groups.
“When making sense of social inequalities, adults may consider the structural forces at play—for example, people may cite policies related to legacy admissions when thinking about how disparities first arise,” says Rachel Leshin, a New York University doctoral student and the lead author of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “But children don’t necessarily see differences in status in this way—and when children are prompted to consider the structural forces, they tend to interpret these structures differently from how adults do.
“However, our work shows that children can think about these matters in a similar manner as adults do if the structures driving inequality are explained to them in specific ways,” she adds. “Such approaches, we found, also reduced the extent of bias children felt against a lower-income group relative to a higher-income group.”
Read the full article about explaining inequality to children by James Devitt at Futurity.