Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The Great Wall, labor, and prejudice

I recently finished teaching a week-long lesson on prejudice in the Han Dynasty with some sixth graders.  I started the week off with this image, accompanied by two questions: How was the Great Wall Built?  Where did the labor come from?  



I audio-recorded all the classes.  Here's the transcript on our discussion of the Great Wall and labor.  I've edited out repetitions and rephrasings, and points where the conversation wandered off topic.  (I wish I could just post the recording, but I can't because I refer to the students by name.)

Me: "Okay, so I have one question... you guys learned a little bit about the great wall last week... how was the great wall built?  I'm curious to hear what you guys have to say about how that happened."  

Student: (Her voice is too soft to hear in the recording, but she mentions that Emperor Shi Huangdi  "made the wall").

Me: "Okay, and how about the second part of this question?  Where did the labor come from?  Do you guys know that word?  What does 'labor' mean"?

Student: (His voice is to soft to hear in the recording, but he mentions workers).

Me:  "Yeah... where did the work come from, who did the work?  

Student: "Commoners did the work, and a lot of people died during it".

Me: "So commoners did the work... average people did the work... the people who did the labor, did they choose to do the labor?"

Many students: "No, Shi Huangdi made them do it!" 

Me: "If Shi Huangdi is forcing peasants to build the wall, how do you think he feels about them?"

Student: "He feels superior!  He doesn't want them in his life."

Me: "So, what she is pointing out is that because Shi Huangdi thinks he is superior, she doesn't think he'd want to spend time with the peasants or go hang out with them.  Because he feels superior, he feels he can force them to do things.  Do you think the wealthy people in ancient China also felt like Shi Huangdi?  Would they have dinner with peasants, or let their children marry a peasant?" 

Student: "I don't think so.  They probably think the peasants are stupid."

Another student: "That wall is stupid.  It's not going to keep anyone out.  They can just use ladders!"

Me: "But the horses can't climb ladders.  They're worried about nomads invading with horses.  The wall keeps the horses out."

The students eyes lit up like he had just had a major realization, which made me laugh inside. 

I was viewing this five minute opening conversation as a way to set the stage for the theme of prejudice that week.  I didn't want to make any explicit connection between forced labor and potential prejudice, because I wanted to see what students would come up with themselves.  Following this short discussion, we moved on to some journal entry reflections on prejudice: I was curious to see if any students would, following that discussion, mention that sometimes wealthy and powerful people had prejudices against poor people.  That didn't turn out to be the case... a story for the next post.   







1 comment:

  1. It seems important to me to separate prejudice from class, since prejudice exists as often between members of a social class as between members of different classes. Moreover, class is essentially a social created phenomenon, whereas prejudice is (I believe) a cognitive coping mechanism. Also, the danger of viewing classicism through the context of prejudice is that it assumes an knowledge of the inner workings of the social system, and cognitive systems of the people in the society.

    Also, prejudice is a broad subject. The prejudice of India, as manifest in the caste system, is part of the collective faith. Their understanding of karma can almost be said to negate their perspective as being prejudice, since it is not so much a personal pre-judging, as the belief that the universe has already prejudged and passed out these karmas from the perspective of a higher intelligence.

    Even within classicist prejudicial systems, the means and rationales underlying the prejudice can be so varied as to make lumping them under a single word a massive oversimplification. In the case of sociopathic personalities within the elite cadres of society, prejudice might be entirely irrelevant, since prejudice assumes an attempt to understand the other, albeit without appropriate context and information. A sociopath may just not care about other people. In the case of the Chinese emperor, if he was a sociopath, it could be that he didn't care about the intelligence or worthiness of the workers, that it did not even cross his mind, and that he might have been just as happy to have the nobles and wealthy building the wall if he thought he could get away with it. A sociopathic personality makes intelligent, amoral decisions from a space of self-aggrandizement and self-preservation.

    Regarding prejudice against poor people, I would find the Reformation and the emergence of the Protestant Work Ethic as an interesting jumping off point. Somehow, somewhere down the line, much of the European unconscious was infiltrated by the belief that God only loves those that work really hard, all the time. Poverty essentially became sinful, since it implied that you don't work hard, and wealth became equated with piety.

    Then again, I am just more interested in the social roots of collective prejudice (such as in religion, industrial education, etc.)

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