I’ve been bracing myself for the release of NurtureShock, a book on childrearing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Early reviews of the book made it sound like a real downer for anti-bias educators. The Wall Street Journal implied that the book made “teaching tolerance and promoting diversity look…unimpressive.” Naturally, I wanted to see what evidence the authors would use to support their claims.
As it turns out, Bronson and Merryman aren’t opposed to anti-bias education at all. In an excerpt in Newsweek Bronson writes about his struggle to raise a tolerant child using the “colorblind” approach favored by most white parents. And the authors note that anti-racist education programs do fail if they don’t include explicit talk about race.
In our field, that’s pretty much common sense. In fact, the failings of colorblindness and the need to talk about race are two of the topics we cover in the just-released issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine.
(Some members of our Facebook group have asked interesting questions about the research cited in NurtureShock, but that’s another blog post for another day.)
I’d be interested to hear what you think about this. Are students satisfied with the “colorblind” approach, and do they learn more when difference is talked about explicitly?
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