Australian is known as a multicultural country. Its diversity in culture makes it an ideal destination that everyone wants to come. However, each cultures has its own perspectives due to the difference in religion, skin colour and many other things. This usually results in discrimination or disagreements between them which lead to racism. As a high school student, especially an international student in Australia, I am more aware of the existence of racism in the education system and its effects on students, teachers and the whole school.
According to the Australian Journal of Teacher Education, it is estimated that around 70% of Australian school students have experienced some form of racism, including both verbal comments and violence, and 67% of these situations have been at school. Racism does exist in Australian education. These numbers have surprised me as I could not believe that racism still exists in a country like Australia. This makes me think about the effects of these problems on the students, and whether this also has any effects on the teachers and the school atmosphere.
How racism affects students and school?
For students, being confronted with racism can bring them many issues. They can be anxious and unhappy. They will also have trouble in making friends with others. These impacts can lower their self-esteem and make them become more aggressive. The students who are affected by these impacts in a long time may start to develop negative behaviours, for example, they will stay away from school or be afraid of going to school, they will separate themselves from the society and they will develop the thinking of revenging the society that bullied them. Additionally, they will start to hate their own culture. In these situations, how can they concentrate on learning? These students will fall behind in school work and get low marks on their exams. Isn’t it a disadvantage for these students? I once read about a story of an Asian student. In his story, he told that everyday he went to school, his mother always made him Bento for lunch. One day, a white kid came up and pushed his food off the table, telling him that the smell of his lunch was disgusting. The Asian kid was so shocked and upset, he decided to tell his mother to prepare him a ‘normal’ lunch, which is sandwich, burgers, and chips. This story may not bring up anything that seems serious, but through this, I could see how racism can affect one’s emotion and push them to reject their own culture.
I inserted the below video to show how the stereotype of white and coloured people has affected the children’s thoughts and emotion. From my perspective, it seems that the kids are not confident about their race, and they looks so upset towards the end of the video, when the narrative starts to ask more questions that relate to the difference between races. The video helps me understand how importance is education to the children, as well as the impact of society and adults on them.
Racism not only affects the individuals who experiencing it, but also the whole school. Students will not make friends with those who have different backgrounds from them. The lose of coherence between the students will possibly lead to fights among these students in the school. Instead of helping each other to strive forwards, the students are spreading hate towards each other. I believe this makes the school lose its meaning. School is where students learn to interact with each other, help their friends and work together to achieve their goals. Racism makes schools’ environment become more unfriendly and unsuitable for studying. People will have less confidence in schools and the education system.
How can we solve this problem?
In my point of view, the most important thing we have to do to prevent racism is that teachers must care for their student and talk to them more. The gap between students and teachers should be closed. Teachers also need to be more delicate when response to these situations. Continuing from the story above as an example, the teacher of the boy had noticed that he changed his lunchbox. Instead of staying silence and did nothing, she brought in dozens of Asian dishes for the kids to try out together. The boy who had been racist previously tried the food and he realized that it was great. He then apologized to the Asian boy. This story shows the importance of how teachers should handle these situations as their actions will have a great impact on the final result. Schools also need to organise more social activities (for example, Harmony Day) so that the students will have more chances to be familiarized with each other’s culture. Getting to know about a new culture will reduce the racist behaviours in the students, therefore, it will reduce the probability of developing racism in school.
References:
https://alltogethernow.org.au/news/racism-disrupts-student-education/
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