My final essay is going to be focused on Discrimination. First of all, I am going to give a definition of the concept that I mentioned before and then I am going to analyze how discrimination is expressed through Literature in Shakespeare´s texts such as “The Tempest” and “The Merchant of Venice”. I chose this topic, because I consider it really important in everyone´s life and also because it is something that can be connected with an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom. I am going to use some examples from my own experience as a student and as a future English teacher; the examples are going to be focused on things that I have seen in my work experience because I think that they are important in this topic.
The Encarta`s encyclopedia defines Discrimination as an “unfair treatment of one person or group, usually because of prejudice about race, ethnicity, age, religion, or gender”. This means that a discriminated person is the one who is segregated by the rest of the people; there are a lot of reasons because they are left a side by others, such as the skin color, or the place where they came from, and some others. As it was mentioned in the definition, this unfair treatment is related to a prejudice. Do you know what a prejudice is? Well, a prejudice is referred to an action or way of thinking about a something or someone. Longman´s dictionary defines this concept as “an unreasonable dislike and distrust of people who are different from you in some way, especially because of their race, sex, religion, etc”. By this definition, it is easy to compare it with the one that I gave before. Having read both definitions, are you able to say that those words can be considered as synonyms? Almost for me, they are synonyms because both are terms which refer to a bad treatment to another people.
If I think a little bit more about Discrimination and the topics that we have seen in our course of Literature, I can see the importance of this topic and how useful could be Literature when you want to teach something like this. When we were studying Shakespeare, and we saw the text “The Tempest” and then the movie “The Merchant of Venice”, I could notice that William Shakespeare was more than a famous English writer, because he was always giving us some messages behind the text. Those two texts gave us a message that it is really important for us, as future English teachers to keep them in mind, and in this case the message behind was Discrimination. In the case of “The tempest”, we could see how colonialism influenced this topic, which was Discrimination. In that book, it was easy to find discrimination to Caliban, a slave, and as we all know, people who has got a lot of money is going to discriminate the rest of the people, who are slaves. In relation to “The Merchant of Venice”, the message was at least implicit in the movie, because everybody could see how Jews were treated by Catholics; this awful treatment, just because they had different beliefs and ways of thinking. When I think about that, I start asking myself if I could discriminate someone because of his/her skin color, or religion, or even their work and if they have money or not, because I really believe that everybody is different but it does not matter how different can anyone be from another one; everybody must have the same rights, because we are all human beings and that make us equals between the other people. I would like to know if you would accept being discriminated or would you like to see that your best friend if being discriminated because of his/her skin color? In my personal opinion, I would not accept such as sacrilege, I am against Discrimination, because we have to accept each other and we have to be respectful in order to be respected.
In my personal experience, when I see someone who is in the street and he/she is wearing dirty clothes I immediately think that maybe he/she is poor. That shows us that stereotypes are part of our society, and that is a factor that also affects Discrimination, because if we create a bad stereotype about someone, we are going to discriminate him/her because of that image that we have in our minds.
In the case of the Chilean society and Chilean schools, I start thinking in an imaginary situation. I imagine a school which is located in the South of Chile, in the 9th region. This school is a private one, so it is located in a high level place. It is supposed that there are going to attend students with money, because they have resources to pay for it. Near to this place, there are people who live in the countryside. There is one family who has a lot of money, so their children are going to attend to this school. To this school are attending students with a high economical level, and those students from the countryside. As we know, their accent and pronunciation is going to be different from the ones who live in the city. In the English class, the teacher asks one student from the countryside to read a paragraph, and he did it very good and clear. Then the teacher asks to another student, to read the same piece of writing. He did it, but his pronunciation was not very good. This makes me think that it does not matter where are you from, the most important thing is that you can do your things well, and without judging people because of their appearance or beliefs.
In relation to everything mentioned before, would you accept discrimination inside the classroom? Would you accept your students bothering between them? In my case I would not, because as I said before we have to be respectful to be respected and we have to accept each other, because we are all human beings.
Work cited:
Shakespeare, William. “The Merchant of Venice” (Movie)
Shakespeare, William. “The Tempest”. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/full.html
http://www.jcu.edu.au/eo/JCUDEV_010542.html
http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861605112/discrimination.html
