CLASSIFICATION

Today in our TOK class we talked about classification. Classification was explained to us as arranging a group of people or things in classes with shared qualities or characteristics. So this class made me think, Why do we feel de need to classify?. According to the lecture we classify because it is our instinct, however i personally think that sometimes classification ourselves can help us find people that we can relate with, either because we come from the same culture, or we are part of the same gender, or we like the same things, but if we have something in common that can put us in the same place after being classify this would mean that in some way we are equals and we can relate. But, where do we get our classification standards from?, personally i think that this standards of classification are passed on, so most of the times they are influence in our surroundings, our cultures, and our ways of living. Is it correct to classify people? Even though i think most of the people that classify don't do it on purpose or its becoming so normal that some times we don't even think about it, classification can lead to a lot of problems. Racism, Homophobic, sexism are just some of the examples of what could happen because of classification. A good example of this is the Holocaust, it is one of the biggest examples of classification in the history of the wold and however it was a terrible massacre. I don't think classification is bad however we have to learn how to us it with out affecting other peoples feeling or rights, we have to think that at the end we all fit in a very big category, we are all human beings.

Here we have an entry in a blog that talks about how the Nazis used to classify the "undesired people" during the Holocaust.
http://andrejkoymasky.com/mem/holocaust/ho03.html