A Review of Jane Elliott’s Experiment In, a Class Divided

In the video “A Class Divided”, Jane Elliot a teacher from Riceville, Iowa engages her third grade class into a brown eyed/blue eyed experiment. The experiment is to help the children to understand about prejudice and discrimination. The same experiment was also used a couple of years later with adults.

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In the brown eyed/blue eyed experiment Jane Elliot told her third graders with blue eyes that they were better than the brown-eyed children. The brown-eyed children had to wear collars so that they could tell each group apart from a distance. Elliot told the blue eyed children that they were smarter, nicer etc. than the other group, they also had special privileges. While she told the brown eyed children that they acting up not doing good, basically the opposite of what she would say to the other group plus they also had less time during recess. Before the experiment started all of the students were friends, cooperated with one another and got along with one another, but during the experiment they started to turn on one another. The students from both groups started to show discrimination the next day of the experiment, during recess one child from the blue group started to call a child from the brown group names. The reason the students started to act this way is because they started to actually believe that their group was better than the other and the group that wasn’t started to feel that they weren’t being treated fairly. The students even showed hatred towards the opposing group and hatred at home, even showing hatred towards their teacher because of what she made the other group believe and how they reacted. Elliot later changed things around when she told the brown-eyed group that they were now better than the blue-eyed group. Whichever group was told they were “superior” to the other achieved quicker and better than the other. This was proven to be true when the brown-eyed children completed a project the teacher had given them in two and a half minutes when they were the superior group compared to when they weren’t and finished it in five minutes. The students were affected by the experiment in their academic skills also, this was showed when the students got lower grades when they weren’t superior, higher when they were and their grades went up overall when it was all over. After the experiment was over the teacher reassured her students that they are all created equal and no one was better than anyone else especially due to eye color. The students were extremely happy when the experiment came to an end because they felt a lot better now that both groups had united again and everyone was getting along.

Jane Elliot asked her students to come back years later when they had reached adulthood and had families of their own. Most of her students had taken the knowledge that they had about confronting prejudice and discrimination and taught their kids not to hate other people due to race or color. Even though they taught their kids about racism some of Elliot’s students said that they have heard their kids say some racial slurs, but whatever the children learned wasn’t from them and was probably picked up from other kids in school.

When Jane Elliot did the experiment with adults she had the blue-eyed group wait outside for about half an hour and when they finally got in to the room, started to make the brown-eyed group believe that the other group was tardy, rude, and not wanting to take part in the lesson. The adults just like the students of Elliot’s first experiment started to believe that they were superior to the other and even started to pick out the bad traits about the other. There was one lady who started to get extremely annoyed with Elliot because of how she was making the brown group feel superior and how she was degrading the blue group. After the experiment was over the blue eyed adults told Elliot that they felt powerless, hopeless and completely uncomfortable during it.

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Jane Elliot’s brow eyed/blue eyed experiment is a great method to show people how it feels to be discriminated. I have had been faced with prejudice in my life a couple of times but none that have greatly affected me. I know how it is to be discriminated against, especially being a minority, people of another race might feel as if they are better than you but if they were in someone else’s shoes they just might not think the same way ever again.