1. Who are you? Who am I? 2. Questions to consider
Who are you? Who am I?
Each one of us belongs to many different social groups based on our gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, income, and other variables, and what matters is how we rank these groups by their importance to our self-esteem.This ranking usually occurs sub-consciously.During our childhood, we gradually value membership more and more in those homogeneous groups with whom we most often experience achievement and feelings of positive worth.
When growing up, I attended and excelled at a school for nine years in which most of my classmates were Whites from affluent families living in the suburbs.As with most children, my network of friends came mostly from this pool of classmates, and during this time of achievement, I prided myself on belonging to these groups, albeit this was mostly in my subconscious.When I went off to boarding school in ninth grade, my roommate was a Hispanic from the inner city who was there on a scholarship.I immediately felt awkward and somewhat distrusting of him, but it was only because I had yet to experience success in small groups where some of the members matched his demographic traits.
Had I experienced success earlier in life with people of his background, I might have identified more with being American, male, Christian, and other traits that I share with many Hispanics in inner cities.In turn, I would have been much more trusting of my ninth-grade roommate, who went on to succeed at a much higher level in high school than I did, and if a problem ever arose between us that we had to solve, I would have been relatively more cooperative with him, and in turn, relatively more creative.
Questions to consider
1. When all of us currently alive have died, perhaps in 120 years, who will be negotiating the end of an international conflict?
Will they and their counterparts see themselves as primarily belonging to the same social group a race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, the same family of religions, etc.?The more this is true, the more creative and successful they will be when trying to end the conflict.Who might be the grandparents and great-grandparents of these future negotiators and where are they now?
2. How can politically conservative parents working for opposing governments - or opposing factions within one government - be enticed into sending their children to the same school? What would the school have to look like?How would we address security and controversial subjects?What teaching methods would maximize learning while simultaneously instilling utmost pride among the students in a social identity that is inclusive of all of them?What would the price tag be and who would pay?How could we involve the general public's children too?If you are a political leader negotiating with your counterpart, how might your child's experiences at school with your counterpart's child, over the next sixteen years, affect the outcome of the ongoing negotiations with your counterpart?
