them

 

I really enjoy working with 'young people' - that's a government category, not mine, but it means people between the ages of 15 and 23. I have found that when people are that age, they are truly open-minded. They have opinions of course, but they're not fixed. And generally, they're liberal as in, they don't want to be racist (..., sexist, etc).

Still, they come out with loads of stereotypes without even realising it. We were chatting over lunch about travelling and other countries. At one stage we got onto the topic of the Far East, places like Japan and Singapore where people only get a maximum of 2 weeks holiday a year.

To us, that's intolerable and the language used to describe it was: 'it's drummed into them'. Like they are 'robots'. You know the stereotypes... I pointed out that you take two weeks off a year if that's all your boss gives you - here or elsewhere. People rarely give up good jobs to go on holidays (though it does happen both here and in Japan).

Often it's not that the facts are wrong about other nations, but how they're framed, the language that is used, even by people who would hate to consider themselves as racist.

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