On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in April 1968, Jane Elliott’s third graders from the small, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, came to class confused and upset. They recently had made King their “Hero of the Month,” and they couldn’t understand why someone would kill him. So Elliott decided to teach her class a daring lesson in the meaning of discrimination. She 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. On the first day, the blue-eyed children were told they were smarter, nicer, neater, and better than those with brown eyes. Throughout the day, Elliott praised them and allowed them privileges such as a taking a longer recess and being first in the lunch line. In contrast, the brown-eyed children had to wear collars around their necks and their behavior and performance were criticized and ridiculed by Elliott. On the second day, the roles were reversed and the blue-eyed children were made to feel inferior while the brown eyes were designated the dominant group.
—Frontline, A Class Divided
Afterwards she had the children write about their experience and what they had learned.
Apparently the experiment was controversial from the start but she continued to teach it and became famous, eventually becoming a diversity educator full time. Lesson of a Lifetime explains the hatred she and her family received because of the experience and why the experiment was so controversial. Had you ever heard of it? Do you think it was a good idea?
yes I had heard of it years ago. actually maybe when it was going on.
I think it’s very good. wonders if any teachers are doing it today. haven’t researched that.
there is nothing like ‘walking in another’s moccasins’ to know how they feel.
even though that short experiment is literally nothing akin to the real suffering of generations who have felt or were marginalized. at least it might make the children ‘think.’
I hadn’t heard of it until this morning when I read letters to the editor In the Wall Street Journal about an article about it. Some people thought it was great, but one fellow said they tried the experiment in his school and he hated it. He thought it was child abuse and his father had it stopped. No doubt about it, it’s a powerful thing to do.
I hadn’t heard about it till I read this post. It is an amazing experiment and practice but, one that I personally would not try to organise here strife ridden as we are between religions, castes, linguistic categories, colour and over riding it all gender. What I would like to do is to do what my generation of children were taught by practice. Throw them all together and let them discover in their own ways that they are all basically the same – human. It worked for my generation but due to politics, it has got lost in India. Sad.
The teacher did this because their area was all white, no diversity.
When my daughter was in kindergarten in the mid 70s I used Fisher-Price people to talk to her class about how they were similar and how they were different. All the kids could tell me what was the same and what was different about each pair of F-P people. When I asked them to show me their hands I asked if each had the same number of fingers and they said yes. I asked if they were the same and each of the black kids said no. Broke my heart.
I know. The saddest story I heard was a woman adopted an African American child and when the child was about 3, I think, she was happily smearing herself with face cream. The mother asked why. Because the child wanted to be white and beautiful too.
Diversity, like religion, is a dangerous thing to teach. As a teacher, we were admonished to stick to the curriculum, with consequences if we decided to do something entirely new. We all took risks, but we had to make sure is wasn’t as overt as Elliot’s lesson! Brave girl!
Yes, that was incredibly brave!