Imagine. You’re a teacher in a small, all white town located in Iowa, USA. Must be difficult to teach your students a true understanding of racism and discrimination. Well, the day after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4th 1968, Jane Elliott exercised a unique lesson which allowed her third grade students to get a glimpse of how it feels to be discriminated against. With all her students being of the same race, she found a way to divide them based on a physical feature; something they didn’t all have in common. No, not a division of gender, but rather eye color.
On April 5th of 1968, Jane Elliott divided her class into the “brown-eyed” and the “blue-eyed” people. On the first day, she claimed the “blue-eyed” people were better than the “brown-eyed”. The way she justified her claims is very similar to how discrimination is often justified and even how authority frequently deals with rebellious people. With Jane Elliott having an authoritative position and personality, and the students being at a gullible young age, they truly felt how it was to be discriminated against. The next day, she explained how she had lied about the previous claim, then stated how, in fact, the “brown-eyed” people were better. The tables were turned, permitting both groups the chance to experience perceived superiority and inferiority. Each day, the deemed “lesser” group was given a collar to wear around their necks, allowing their classmates to be able to easily distinguish them apart, a practice similar to what often happens in real life segregated situations.
The consequences and results of her experiment were astonishing. In a span of just two days, Jane Elliott observed not only a transformation in the behavior of the children, but also how the perceived superiority and inferiority affected their test scores. At the end of the second day, she clears everything up with her students so that they realize it was all just an exercise. What better way to understand discrimination than to know how it feels to be discriminated against.
Curious to see more? Because it doesn’t stop there. You can watch online, for free, a documentary presented by PBS Frontline called “A Class Divided” which features not only her in class experiments and the documented behavior of the students, but the aftermath as well. Years later, the students return to watch the footage together as adults, and talk about the eye opening effect the “blue-eye/brown-eye” exercise has had on their lives as well as their views on racism and discrimination. Then, the documentary follows Jane as she tries a variation of her exercise on adults in a place where there is segregation by design: a corrections facility. Overall, a very interesting documentary to watch and, especially it being free and available online, I highly recommend it.
PBS Frontline’s “A Class Divided”:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided
Jane Elliott’s website:
http://www.janeelliott.com
Jane Elliott’s Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott.
by Mr. Squirrel
November 6th, 2009 → 4:09 pm0