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Along with finger painting and story time, Canadian preschools are also spilling over with ethnic tension, according to a study released by Concordia University.

“We found Asian-Canadian and French-Canadian children seemed to prefer interacting with kids of the same ethnic background,” said report co-author Nadine Girouard in a Tuesday release.

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At mixed-race daycares throughout Montreal, researchers took Asian-Canadian children and French Canadian children, ranging in age from three to five years old, and paired them up in rooms with “attractive toys” such as a marble track or a Sesame Street-themed playhouse. When put in with members of the same race, children happily played together. When mixed with different races, however, the children usually opted to play alone. Preschoolers “express a preference for same-ethnic interactions,” reads the study.The revelation is nothing new. For more than 60 years, psychologists have been finding evidence of barely-toilet-trained children exhibiting prejudicial tendencies. In the late 1940s, American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark tried to gauge the inherent prejudices of children by showing them black and white dolls and asking which was better. Whether the child was white or black, the child “indicated a clear-cut preference for white.” “It is clear that the Negro child, by the age of five is aware of the fact that to be colored in contemporary American society is a mark of inferior status,” the pair wrote. Their research was ultimately a factor in the 1954 US Supreme Court Decision to de-segregate public schools. In subsequent American studies, researchers have found black and white children self-segregating as a early as kindergarten.