Essays on A Class Divided

1985

"A Class Divided" is a 1985 episode of the PBS series Frontline. Directed by William Peters, the episode profiles the Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliott and her class of third graders, who took part in a class exercise about discrimination and prejudice in 1970 and reunited in the present day to recall the experience.

Jane Elliott wanted to show her pupils what discrimination feels like, and what it can do to people. Elliott divided her class by eye color — those with blue eyes and those with brown. She told them that blue-eyed people were superior to those with brown eyes. It wasn’t long before Brown witnessed a dramatic change.