ABSTRACT
Children are inevitably interested in a strange man talking into a pocket dictaphone and walking round their playground, but they are not nearly so self-conscious as adults. Nor is the playground a secret society, but only a world which normally grown-ups do not enter. In this chapter, the author talks about the approach he tried in First School and by the end of a month of pilot observation the number of approaches by the five- and six-year-olds had fallen dramatically to practically zero. The Oxford First School had a clear policy about how to educate for life in a multi-racial society. Rather than ignore racial and cultural differences and treat all the children as if they were exactly the same, they made a conscious effort to talk about the differences and carefully removed any books from their library that portrayed other cultures in terms of unflattering stereotypes.
