A few weeks ago we had an assembly about Stereotypes. We were shown a picture of different people and asked who would we would like to be our teacher and why. Some of us gave a variety of reasons – the person wearing a tie as they looked responsible, the women in the picture because a lot of our teachers are women. We were then shown the same picture again and asked to pick out who was the teacher, doctor, head teacher, criminal, mechanic and actor.

We found this a little harder and some of us made some interesting assumptions about the people in the picture. We learnt that we all naturally group people – old, young etc but we also learnt that sometimes this becomes a problem. It’s not the grouping that is bad. What can be harmful is when we think that everyone in a group is the same. We usually view stereotypes as being negative because they make assumptions about all the people in one group.

We talked about how it was important not to think a group of people is bad just because of the actions of a few in that group – we should learn more about people and situations before we judge them.