SCHOOL DISCRIMINATION: CAUSES, TYPES AND CONSEQUENCES - ECONOMÍA - 2025

The discrimination school is the negative treatment from an individual or group to certain people based on characteristics such as race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or group to which they belong within an educational context. This phenomenon is widespread in our culture, and it causes extremely negative consequences.

School discrimination can occur both by teachers towards a student or a group of them, and among students themselves. In the second case, this type of discrimination is generally known as bullying, especially if those who discriminate do so directly and constantly.

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School discrimination does not have a single cause, but cultural, psychological and motivational factors play an important role in its appearance. Because of this, it is very difficult to avoid it completely; but the highly negative consequences that it causes in the lives of those who suffer it mean that it is trying to prevent it from the root.

In today's increasingly multicultural, diverse and open society, it is essential to try to understand why school discrimination occurs and to eliminate it. In this article we will tell you what its most important characteristics are, why it occurs, what consequences it generates and how it can be prevented.

Causes

As is the case with so many psychological phenomena, it is impossible to single out a single factor as the cause of discrimination in the school environment. On the contrary, there are many elements that can play a role in its appearance. Each exclusion situation will be produced by a unique combination of some of them.

In general, the causes of school discrimination are usually classified into three large groups: emotional factors, sociocultural factors, and individual factors. Next we will see which are the most important within each of these categories.

Emotional factors

Most of the time, school discrimination responds to unconscious emotions on the part of the people who carry it out. This is especially true in the case that it is the classmates themselves who attack a student, although it can also be one of the causes of discrimination by a teacher.

The emotional factor that most frequently causes active discrimination is frustration. According to Berkowitz's theory, when a person is unable to achieve their goals, internal discomfort occurs in the form of anger and frustration that the person wants to eliminate.

One of the easiest ways to eliminate this anger, or at least decrease it, is by attacking another individual. This strategy is especially frequent among people with low emotional intelligence, a very common characteristic among children and adolescents.

On the other hand, school discrimination can also respond to the emotional need that some individuals have to feel superior to the rest. By attacking another person and making them feel bad, bullies experience a temporary boost in self-esteem, a feeling that is highly addictive and can lead to more confrontations in the future.

Sociocultural factors

One of the factors that most influence school discrimination is the existence of negative prejudices that lead students and teachers to see individuals with certain characteristics as rare or inferior. These prejudices can come both from society as a whole and from the person's social sphere.

The most common social prejudices change over time. Thus, just a few decades ago, homosexuality was considered as something frightening, while today it is practically normalized in our country. Each community and society has unique prejudices, which can lead to discrimination.

On the other hand, the family and social environment of a person also influences the way in which this is going to take the existence of certain characteristics in other people.

Thus, despite the fact that an individual lives in a non-racist country, if their environment discriminates against others based on their origin, they may present discriminatory attitudes in this regard.

Individual factors

Along with emotional and social factors, we can also find some psychological characteristics that play a very important role in the appearance of discrimination. According to numerous studies, not all people have the same predisposition to become bullies.

Thus, aggressors tend to share certain psychological traits such as higher levels of aggressiveness, lower intelligence, lower tolerance for frustration, authoritarianism, greater need for control, and lower cognitive flexibility. Lack of self-esteem is also often associated with discriminatory attitudes.

Types

There are many types of school discrimination, and many different criteria can be used to classify them. The most common is the trait for which the victim is being discriminated against, being able to find reasons of gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic factors, ethnicity, origin, appearance, intellectual capacities…

However, a more useful classification is one that divides the different types of discrimination into direct and indirect ones. The first would be those attacks that occur openly, in the form of insults, threats, physical attacks or harassment, either by a teacher or a student.

On the other hand, indirect discrimination consists of the existence of norms or situations that try to affect different students differently due to their innate characteristics. Thus, for example, the lack of access for wheelchairs would be a type of indirect discrimination towards disabled students.

Consequences

School discrimination, both in its indirect form and in cases where it has to do with the rules of the educational center, has a very negative impact on the children who suffer it. The more intense it is, the worse the consequences will be, both in the short and in the medium and long term.

In the short term, children who are being discriminated against will experience problems interacting in a normal way with other students. In addition to this, your mood will tend to be negative, worsening this condition over time. Generally, the academic results of the victims will tend to get worse and worse.

However, it is in the medium and long term that really worrying consequences caused by school discrimination begin to be seen. Numerous studies link the fact of having suffered bullying or having received different treatment with lower than normal levels of self-esteem.

In addition to this, in the long term, people who suffered discrimination as children are more likely to develop problems such as stress, anxiety or depression. Some research even links this problem with economic and social difficulties.

Intragroup consequences

On the other hand, it is important to consider that not only the victims of school discrimination suffer negative consequences due to this situation. Both the aggressors themselves and society as a whole can experience all kinds of problems due to this situation.

On the one hand, if they are not standing on their feet, bullies unconsciously learn that aggressiveness and even violence are good methods to achieve what they set out to do and feel validated. This, in the long run, usually causes all kinds of problems once they get out of the safe environment that is school.

At the social level, discrimination usually generates growing tensions between the different groups that exist. If this situation continues over time, more serious confrontations may appear, in which physical violence or even different types of crimes may appear.

An example of this last consequence would be the situation that non-heterosexual people have suffered throughout history. Because it was socially well seen to discriminate against them, this group has suffered a large number of aggressions, attacks and even murders solely because of their sexual condition.

How to prevent school discrimination?

Despite the fact that fear and hatred towards what is different seem to have a certain innate component, the reality is that school discrimination is caused above all by the learning that children carry out from what they see around them. Therefore, the prevention of these situations is related precisely to education.

On the one hand, parents have to show by example that it is not necessary to be afraid of someone who is different. Many times, adults act in not very constructive ways without realizing it; but children absorb all the information from their environment, and create their vision of the world based on it.

Therefore, the best way to prevent school discrimination is for each child's parents to be very aware of the way they act when they are in front of someone who is different. The little ones will absorb this information, and will tend to act in the same way in education.

In addition to this, within the school itself it is possible to promote open-mindedness and inclusiveness of children. To do this, a very effective way is to expose them directly to colleagues with different characteristics, trying to help them put themselves in their place.

If this work is done correctly, children will develop their empathy and begin to realize that the differences that separate them from others are only superficial. When this point of view has penetrated them, school discrimination is doomed to disappear.

References

1. "Discrimination in schools" in: Stephensons. Retrieved on: April 17, 2019 from Stephensons: stephensons.co.uk.
2. "Overview of discrimination in education" in: Citizens Advice. Retrieved on: April 17, 2019 from Citizens Advice: citizensadvice.org.uk.
3. "Preventing discrimination" in: eSchool Today. Retrieved on: April 17, 2019 from eSchool Today: eschooltoday.com.
4. "Preventing discrimination in schools" in: Simplify Training. Retrieved on: April 17, 2019 from Simplify Training: trainingtoday.blr.com.
5. "Discrimination in education" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved: April 17, 2019 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.