What we learned in school...

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a screening of a documentary on Greece and Turkey called “The Other Town”. While viewing this documentary was extra credit for me in a geography class, I found that throughout the film I constantly connected the lessons learned to our race and ethnicity class. The film focused on the tension between the people of Greece and Turkey. The citizens of both countries had a generalized idea about the “other”. Their ideas were based off of very little fact and mostly elaboration. This made me think about stereotypes in general and how stereotypes exist around the world. In this documentary, the researched focused a lot on children and their history coursework. Often, what they learned in school and through textbooks fed in to demonized ideas about the other and painted their own country as heroic. I really started to wonder about the things we learn in our textbooks and I think this would be an interesting topic to explore. Do our textbooks (grades k-12 mainly) feed into stereotypes and create prejudices?