Prejudices, learning and education

Abstract

The works carried out by psychology, and in particular by educational psychology, have established relationships between prejudiced behaviors in children and processes of exclusion in the classroom. In other words, childhood behaviors that are informed by prejudice related to race, sexual orientation, or gender identities, as well as to forms other than disability, or personality traits that are outside of parameters of normality, are often associated with processes of exclusion. There are two learning mechanisms of organisms: those of an implicit type (adaptive activities that are not the result of a will to learn, but are routine among individuals), and those of an explicit type (learning of greater complexity and exclusively human). This paper shows how education can help others to eliminate their prejudices (principle of all forms of exclusion), because all prejudice is acquired through implicit learning. To achieve this goal, we take as a method the review and thematic reading of two types of sources: 1) the literature on the concept of prejudice from the field of social psychology; 2) recent work on the psychology of learning. In the end, we propose that the elimination of prejudice is achieved through educational processes that are aimed at achieving explicit learning.