Propuesta para la implementación de sistema de orden y limpieza en la

This section considers some of the theoretical perspectives on 'race' and children that emerged during the 1980s.

Frances Aboud's book Children and Prejudice (1988) offers, from a social psychological perspective, probably the most detailed examination currently available of racism in childhood. Aboud discusses three types of explanation of children's racism. One, which she calls the inner state or authoritarian theory of prejudice, explains prejudice as stemming 'from an inability to accept and control one's aggressive impulses as a result of the harsh way in which one's parents dealt

with them (p21). The other two she refers to as social reflection theory and social- cognitive developmental theory. Social reflection theory explains racial prejudice as the product of societal factors, perhaps transmitted by the child's parents. Aboud makes the following criticisms of social reflection theory (pi01):

i) 'it cannot explain the shift from social values to parental attitudes as the critical determinant of children's attitudes';

ii) 'it cannot explain what aspect of social status is understood by children from 4 to 7 years';

iii) it can't explain 'the effects of exposure on the child's awareness of social status, and...why children under 8 years are not affected by exposure'.

And also (p i9):

iv) it implies children are passive receptacles;

v) it can't explain why racial prejudice doesn't get stronger with age; vi) it can't account for individual differences in degree of prejudice.

Aboud rejects social reflection theory in favour of social-cognitive developmental theory. She suggests the following developmental progression (p28ff). White children acquire racial prejudices at 3-5 years. At age 7-8 prejudice begins to decline. She says that more than half of the studies show this, though some studies show no decline (and Milner 1983, pi 12-3, which she does not refer to, speaks of 'a gradual intensification of prejudice'). According to Aboud racial prejudice is primarily (i.e. in the period of its strongest influence, from 4-7 years) the inevitable product of two innate psychological processes. 'My view is that the early focus on the self and the early dominance of affective and need states can explain prejudice

from 4 to 7 years' (pi03). At this age racial prejudice is the result of 'wariness and fear' of 'strangers who are different and unpredictable'. The next developmental stage is dominated by perceptions. 'Dissimilar people are disliked'. Only in the third stage, from 7 years, does the emergence of cognitive understanding produce a decline in racial prejudice. She argues that 'prejudice may be regarded as inevitable

but not necessarily enduring because it is based on inevitable aspects of a young child’s way of thinking which eventually disappear (p22 - emphasis added).

She sees the age of about 7 as a crucial turning point at which cognitive capacities undergo a qualitative development, from, in Piaget's terms, the stage of pre- operational thinking to that of concrete operational thinking, whose two main elements are conservation and perspective-taking. The growth of cognitive capacities allows racial prejudice to be released from the dominance of affect and perceptions and subjected to rationality, resulting in a decline in prejudice from the age of 7. During middle childhood children's ethnic stereotyping begins to break down, as they recognise intragroup differences and intergroup similarities. More precisely, children first develop an understanding of group categorisation and identity, and later a greater understanding of individual difference. The two critical ages are just prior to 8 years, and 12 (pi 20).

Aboud's conclusion is that, while the exact relationship of these ethnic cognitions to racial prejudice remains to be clarified, it seems that their development correlates with a decline in prejudice (pi 15).

Two types of criticism can be addressed to Aboud's argument. The first is a specific application to 'race' in children’s development of the general critique of Piagetian cognitive developmentalism made by Donaldson (1978) and others. In his own study of 'race' and children, Cohen (1989) summarises the Piagetian view as follows: children age 7 to 8 years 'are still at the stage of 'concrete operations' and lack the social and cognitive means to transend their ego-centric, and by extension

ethnocentric, view of the world'. He argues that 'children's actual capacities do not necessarily correspond to the Piagetian schema, precisely because of the rationalistic bias built into its experimental procedures. In other contexts and faced with other tasks children may well prove more advanced in their competences'. (p20). He gives examples of young children understanding the arbitrary nature of games, or interpreting television programmes.

The second type of criticism refers to the way Aboud conceives of sociological and psychological explanations. First, she explicitly states that she regards

psychological explanations as possessing greater explanatory power (1988, p75). Secondly, her characterisation of social reflection theory depends upon a

reductionist and crudely determinist notion of the relationship between society and the individual. There is a vast sociological literature, particularly within the marxist and Weberian traditions, which retains the concept of societal determination, but addresses the complex and contradictory processes which mediate between the individual, as an active social agent, and social structure. The consequence of undervaluing the status of sociological factors is to fall into the opposite trap of

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psychological determinism, which leads Aboud to explain racism in terms of innate mental predispositions: fear of strangers; dislike of dissimilarity.

Flowing from the particular psychological perspective Aboud adopts are two major limitations of method. The first is to examine racial prejudice in isolation from the totality of social processes of childhood. The a priori marking-off of a limited area of enquiry as concerned with ethnicity closes off numerous other aspects of children's lives which may be racialised. (Miles makes the same point in general terms). The second limitation is her focus on attitudes but not on behaviour, and hence her reliance on certain types of experimental evidence, particularly to the exclusion of ethnographic enquiry. The result is that she leaves almost all of the real lives of children unexamined.