ABSTRACT
There are those who believe that young children are unaware of ethnic differences: it is a view which, in Britain at least, received what may well have been taken as authoritative confirmation in a pamphlet issued by the (then) Ministry of Education in 1963. 'Young children seem to be quite unconscious of colour differences,' this said, 'and there is no more pleasing sight than to watch in some of our primary schools groups of children of different racial origins working and playing happily together. Here has been created quite naturally and effectively the kind of social climate in which differences of race or of colour are accepted as a matter of course and are simply not noticed.' We shall show below that the evidence goes against this view. This is hardly surprising; after all children do imitate and copy, and absorb the attitudes and behaviour of their parents and of other individuals important to them.
