Locals say that drivers don't signal when they turn because everyone knows where everyone else is going. To get her points across, Elliott hurled insults at workshop participants, particularly those who were white and had blue eyes. The Blue Eye/Brown Eye was an experiment performed by Jane Elliot in 1968 on the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. They embraced the experiments reductive message, as well as its promised potential, thereby keeping the implausible rationale of Elliotts crusade alive and well for decades, however flawed and racist it really was. Jane Elliott, an educator and anti-racism activist, first conducted her blue eyes/brown eyes exercise in her third-grade classroom in Iowa in 1968. The brown-eyed children could take off their armbands and give them to the blue-eyed children, who were now taught that they were inferior to the brown-eyed children. ", Jane shielded her eyes from the morning sun. The exercise is "an inoculation against racism," she says. . Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. One caller complained that white children would not be able to handle . She has led training sessions at General Electric, Exxon, AT&T, IBM and other corporations, and has lectured to the IRS, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Department of Education and the Postal Service. Even family members can turn against each other if some authority suddenly decides that those differences are a problem. In the most uncomfortable moments, Elliott reminds the students of violent acts caused by racism or homophobia. Children often fight, argue, and sometimes hit each other, but this time they were motivated by eye color. Ethics + Religion; Health; Politics + Society; . But Elliotts experiment had a more sinister impact. In this documentary, Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher divided her class into two groups based on their eye color; one group had blue eyes and the other had brown eyes. On the first day of the experiment, Elliott told the children who had blue eyes that they were superior to the children with brown eyes; that they were better, nicer and smarter. Elliot said that when the children were given the test on the same day that they were in the superior group, they tended to get the highest scores. She and Darald split their time between a converted schoolhouse in Osage, Iowa, a town 18 miles from Riceville, and a home near Riverside, California. The day after Kings murder, Jane Elliott, a white third-grade teacher in rural Riceville, Iowa, sought to make her students feel the brutality of racism. The demonstration has since been taught by generations of teachers to millions of kids across the country. Considering all the stereotypes and prejudices that exist, what kind of damage is being done? It is a must . She told them brown-eyed . people are better than blue-eyed people. Yes, the children felt angry, hurt, betrayed. The kids in the bottom group became timider and kept to themselves. She split the class in two categories, according to eye color, and told the children that one group was superior to the others. All 28 children found their desks, and Elliott said she had something special for them to do, to begin to understand the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the day before. She says its because racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ethnocentrism are mean and nasty. In 2001, she was still trying to make a change. Delivery in 6+ hours! "Well, what do you expect from him, Mrs. Elliott," a brown-eyed student said as a blue-eyed student got an arithmetic problem wrong. "There's a sense of renewal here that I've never seen anywhere else," Elliott says. One group consisted pupils with brown eye while the other group consisted of those with blue eyes. She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. Jane Elliots work and experiences have made her an authority on education and anti-racism. You didnt understand the directions. Despite the adaptation of the experiment in psychological studies, Jane has been widely criticized for her unethical conduct and promotion of discrimination among children. Facilitators should be aware that Jane Elliott's focus on white people can lead viewers to the wrong impression that people of color are passively molded by white people's behavior when, in actuality, people of color can and do respond to racism in a variety of ways. Biddle, B. J. And what she did caused an uproar. ", Elliott says the role of a teacher is to enhance students' moral development. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Elliott developed a simple exercise that explored the nature of racism and prejudice.. Elliott's method for exploring racism in the context of an all-white classroom consisted of dividing her students into two groups on the basis of eye color, blue or brown (those with other eye colors were assigned to the group . Right off the bat, she picked me out of the room and called me Barbie, Pasicznyk told me. This procedure is sometimes so subtle that no one notices it happening. One key assumption is that the sample population represents an actual society. Essay Example, Essay Example on Racism Towards Black People, Essay Sample about Developing a Campaign for School Intimidation, Essay Example on Therapist-Client Relationship Boundaries, Islamic Perspective on Euthanasia, Free Essay Sample. She told her students that she had made a mistake the previous day and that brown-eyed students . She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. Elliott asked her students to write about their experiences for the local newspaper. But they returned to a better placeunlike a child of color, who gets abused every day, and never has the ability to find him or herself in a nurturing classroom environment." (2013). It also documents small-town White America's reflex reaction to the . How can we teach kids to be more like him? . Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes 1968 - Jane Elliot, grade school teacher in Iowa conducted a classroom experiment to test whether racism was a learned characteristic Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes - an experiment to "create racism" Jane Elliot divided her 4th grade class into two groups based on eye color The Brown eyed group were told they were superior due . It is quite powerful to watch. In a similar vein, Linda Seebach, a conservative columnist for the Rocky Mountain News, wrote in 2004 that Elliott was a "disgrace" and described her exercise as "sadistic," adding, "You would think that any normal person would realize that she had done an evil thing. Barbie had to have a Ken, so Elliott picked from the audience a tall, handsome man and accused him of doing the same things with his female subordinates, Pasicznyk said. The video . SYNOPSIS OF BLUE EYED. The "invisible knapsack" is an analogy for a set of invisible and not widely talked about privileges that white people possess in the society. Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She also made the brown-eyed students put construction paper armbands on the blue-eyed students. She told the students that the brown-eyed children were inferior and repeated the experiment. In Zimbardo's experiment the conditions were much more controlled for later study but the r. A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it "evil. In Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Do the Right Things, educational psychologist Michele Borda says it "teaches our children to counter stereotypes before they become full-fledged, lasting prejudices and to recognize that every human being has the right to be treated with respect." The blue eyes brown eyes study was a study on group prejudice and discrimination conducted by Jane Elliot. She wanted to show her students that an arbitrarily established difference could separate them and pit them against each other. They killed hundreds of thousands of people based on eye color alone, thats the reason I used eye color for my determining factor that day., Elliott divided the class into children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes. "That you, Ms. And they are smarter than blue-eyed people." The brown-eyed children got to sit in the front of the room, to go to lunch first, and to have more time at recess. The Blue Eyes & Brown Eyes Exercise. For many, the experiment went horribly awry. Would you? "Because we might catch something," a brown-eyed boy said. Elliott started to see her own white privilege, even her own ignorance. Their response is to create dichotomies of inferiority and superiority. She learned that the responses from the children were negative and more generalized about what they thought about black people. When Elliott conducted the exercise the next year, she added something extra to collect data. On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott's third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. Jane Elliott, an educator and anti-racism activist, first conducted her blue eyes/brown eyes exercise in her third-grade classroom in Iowa in 1968. In a grassy front yard down the block is a hand-lettered sign: "Glads for Sale, 3 for $1." The hate and discrimination that we see in adults have their origin in their upbringing. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue . The results showed a reversal effect in which the blue-eyed students showed signs of inferiority and low self-esteem. This is the phrase that inspired one of the most well-known experiments in education. Why are we still talking about this experiment over 50 years later? At lunchtime, Elliott hurried to the teachers' lounge. THE ANGRY EYE , a 35-minute video, features Jane Elliott conducting her Blue Eyed/Brown Eyed exercise with college students. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise ." As a school teacher in the small town of Riceville, Iowa, Elliott first conducted the anti-racism experiment on her all-white third-grade classroom, the day after the civil rights leader was killed. The answer, in a word, was nothing. In this photograph from Sept. 13, 1965, Black children on their way to school in New York City pass by segregationists protesting integrated busing. She had never met me, and she accused me in front of everyone of using my sexuality to get ahead.. In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, Jane Elliott devised the controversial and startling, "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise." This, now famous, exercise labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of . In explaining the experiment rules to the brown-eyed contestants, she addresses the people of color in the room. They were forced to sit on the back rows and had to use a . Children with brown eyes were forced to wear armbands that made it easy for people to see that they had brown eyes. Copyright 20102023, The Conversation Media Group Ltd. What Was the Purpose of the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment? Jane Elliot's experiment involves cheating and intentional misinterpretation of facts. Typical of their responses was that of Debbie Hughes, who reported that "the people in Mrs. Elliott's room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. There are risks to those inoculations, too, but we determine that those risks are worth taking. Ethical issues were 1/3 of the participants refused to take the head off the rat . "Your son got what he deserved," the woman said. The next day, Jane made it known to the students that she had made a mistake and that the brown-eyed pupils were better and smarter than their counterparts. The tallest structure in Riceville is the water tower. [online] Today I Found Out. It seemed to evince that all white people had to do to learn about racism was restrain themselves from an impulse to engage in made-up cruelty. "That's what I tried to teach, and that's what drove the other teachers crazy. These are the sources and citations used to research Jane Elliott's blue eye brown eye case study is/isn't more ethical than Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. As a result of those divisions, you see racial discrimination or even terrorism. Scores of others did participate. "It's Riceville 30 years ago. She noticed that student relationships had changed; even if students were friendly outside of the exercise, they treated each other with arrogance or bossiness once the roles were assigned. Elliott said that blue-eyed people were less intelligent and less clean. Having in mind that it would be difficult to explain to third graders about discrimination, she needed to be more practical so that her student could understand how discrimination and prejudice felt. "You have to put the exercise in the context of the rest of the year. The nearest traffic light is 20 miles away. "Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. Some people feel we can't move on when you have her out there hawking her 30-year-old experiment. The effectiveness of a well-known prejudice-reduction simulation activity, "Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes," was assessed as a tool for changing the attitudes of nonblack teacher education students toward blacks. Kors writes that Elliott's exercise taught "blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites," adding that "in her view, nothing has changed in America since the collapse of Reconstruction." "We give our children shots to inoculate them against polio and smallpox, to protect them against the realities in the future. Retrieved from https://speedypaper.com/essays/ethical-concerns-in-jane-elliots-experiment, Free essays can be submitted by anyone, so we do not vouch for their quality. "Let me look at you," Elliott said. The people and cultures already present in a place often feel threatened by new immigrants. "If this ugly change, if this negative change can happen this quickly, why can't positive change happen that quickly? "You can see the look on their faces. The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate . There is a way to avoid editing or writing from scratch! It also shows how arbitrary and subjective things can turn friends, family members, and citizens against each other. She told them that people with brown eyes were better than people with blue eyes. The 1970s and 1980s were ripe for diversity education in the private and public sectors, and Elliott would try out the experiment at workshops on tens of thousands of participants, not just in the U.S. and Canada, but in Europe, the Middle East and Australia. The fact that children are easy to manipulate into acting in a particular manner explains Jane's choice of sample. The fourth of five children, Elliott was born on her family's farm in Riceville in 1933, and was delivered by her Irish-American father himself. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The Brown Eyed / Blue Eyed Experiment. 10 Psychological Experiments That Could Never Happen Today. That's what it feels like when you're discriminated against.". "No person of any age [was] going to leave my presence with those attitudes unchallenged," Elliott said. 5/21/2020 Topic: Module 2 Discussion: Jane Elliott, a teacher and anti-racism activist, performed a direct experiment with the students in her classroom. The blue-eyed participants faced discrimination for two and a half hours. Pasicznyk joined 75 other employees for a training session in the companys suburban Denver headquarters in the late 1980s. We use them to divide and destroy people., White peoples number one freedom, in the United States of America, is the freedom to be totally ignorant of those who are other than white. a brown-eyed boy asked. "He's a bluey! Researchers later concluded that there was evidence that the students became less prejudiced after the study and that it was inconclusive as to whether or not the potential harm outweighed the benefits of the exercise. Select from the 0 categories from which you would like to receive articles. One of the blue eyed even went to hit a brown eyed just for the fact that he was brown eyed. At her lunch break that day in the teacher's lounge, she told her colleagues about the exercise. The corn grows so fast in northern Iowafrom seedling to seven-foot-high stalk in 12 weeksthat it crackles. "It changed my life. Two students even got into a physical altercation. The people of riceville did not exactly welcome Elliott home from New York with a hayride. The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Elliott had a talk with her students about diversity and racism. View Module 2 Discussion_ Are We Still Divided_ Blue Eyes_Brown Eyes_ A 3rd Grade Lesson for Us All.pdf from HUMN 330 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "Mention two wordsJane Elliottand you get a flood of emotions from people," says Jim Cross, the Riceville Recorder's editor these days. Words are the most powerful weapon devised by humankind. Before proceeding with the test, she began with random questions to fully understand the children's perception of Negroes. She has spoken at more than 350 colleges and universities. SpeedyPaper website, please click below to request its removal: Liked this essay sample but need an original one? I felt mad. They gossiped about her in the hallway. If you are the original author of this essay and no longer wish to have it published on the The experiment was to be a division of eye colour starting with blue eyed student having superiority and then the following day, the roles would be reversed. I got to have five minutes extra of recess." Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage. She believed that experience was the only way her students could understand how it felt like to be discriminated. Immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Professor Jane Elliott used the minimal group paradigm to perform an experiment that would teach her students about race discrimination. Elliott was not. "This here is Jane Elliott," I said. Jane Elliott's brown eye/blue eye experiment starts at 03:10 of A Class Divided. ", We backed out. On the first day of the experiment, she declared the brown-eyed group superior and gave them extra privileges like seconds at lunch, extra recess time, and access to the new school playground. One example that has been in place for many years is the blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment. When some of the . At first, she cooperated with me. Withdrawn brown-eyed kids were suddenly outgoing, some beaming with the widest smiles she had ever seen on them. However, the study shows some bias in the sample size and race of participants. 1. Yes, that day was tough. As Elliott recalls, she engineered the "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise" in 1968 after watching the late-night news cycle announce the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than be deterred by possible Zimbardocreator of the also controversial 1971 Stanford Prisoner Experiment, which was stopped after college student volunteers acting as "guards" humiliated students acting as "prisoners"says Elliott's exercise is "more compelling than many done by professional psychologists. Exploring your mind Blog about psychology and philosophy. Watch it online right now! Her class, That same year, Elliott was invited to the White House Conference on Children and Youth to conduct an exercise on adult educators. One even wrote a lipstick message with racial slurs. She left teaching in the mid-80s to speak publicly about the experience and the impact of prejudice and racism. This time, the participants werent a bunch of elementary school children they were young adults. Elliott split her students into two groups, based on eye color. That's not true. Disclaimer: SpeedyPaper.com is a custom writing service that provides online on-demand writing work for assistance purposes. "They shot that King yesterday. Issues such as the right to know, the right to privacy, and informed consent. Thousands of educators across the United States folded the experiment into their curriculums. Proceeding with the experiment, Elliot divided the children into two groups each with nine pupils. All rights reserved. Solve your problem differently! Stripping away the veneer of the experiment, what was left had nothing to do with race. Through this study, Elliot demonstrated how easy it is for prejudice and discrimination to emerge from just a simple message that people with one eye color are superior to people with another eye color. To most people, it seemed to suggest that racism could be reduced, even eliminated, by a one- or two-day exercise. Nevertheless, Elliott became as famous as a teacher could become in America. Although actions from the experiment show lack of respect towards subjects it has widely been recognized in the study of human behavior in social and cultural context. "On an airplane, it is," Elliott said to appreciative laughter from the studio audience. Their 12-year-old daughter, Mary, came home from school one day in tears, sobbing that her sixth-grade classmates had surrounded her in the school hallway and taunted her by saying her mother would soon be sleeping with black men. To this day, at the age of 86, Jane Elliott continues this work. All the work should be used in accordance with the appropriate policies and applicable laws. The blue-eyed brown-eyed experiment was conducted by Jane Elliott, a school teacher from Iowa, in which she separated blue eyed children from brown eyed children and took turns making one of the "superior" to the other. Jane Elliott has done a lot of reflection about the consequences of the minimal group experiment. Now, almost four decades later, Elliott's experiment still mattersto the grown children with whom she experimented, to the people of Riceville, population 840, who all but ran her out of town, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an exercise based on the experiment. The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise continues to be relevant. School ought to be about developing character, but most teachers won't touch that with a ten-foot pole.". Its goal was to demonstrate what prejudice was to her third grade class. Then a picture was taken to remember. ", Dean Weaver, 70, superintendent of Riceville schools from 1972 to 1979, said, "She'd just go ahead and do things. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town's children for more than a decade. Throughout the day, Elliott continued to give the children with blue eyes special treatment. Elliott continues, "Just when you think that the fertile soil can sprout no more, another season comes round, and you see another year of bountiful crops, tall and straight. The mainstream media were complicit in advancing such a simplistic narrative. Jane divided the class into 9 brown eyes and 9 blue eyes. Elliott instructed the blue-eyed kids not to play on the jungle gym or swings. Jane Elliott's experiment. On the other hand, privileged members of the community are treated as in-groups which earn them undue respect and capacity to abuse the less advantaged. She traveled to corporations, banks, prisons, schools and military bases. Sign up for Politics Weekly.]. With a couple of basic and arbitrary examples, Elliott made the case that brown-eyed people were better. She nodded. Brown-eyed people, she told the students, are smarter, more civilized and better than blue-eyed people. The searing story is a cautionary tale that examines power and privilege in and out of the classroom. Ms. Elliott, now 87, said she started teaching about racism on April 5, 1968 the day after the Rev. one girl asked. She knew that the children weren't going to buy her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. Students in the inferior groups were more likely to get a worse score. Separate the class into two halves - those with blue eyes and those with brown. The blue-eyed girl apologized. Elliott flew to the NBC studio in New York City. Would you like to get this essay by email? Questioning authority The mainstream media were complicit in advancing such a simplistic narrative. The contents of Exploring Your Mind are for informational and educational purposes only. We use them to divide and destroy people., On Understanding The Different Ways We Treat Other Races, Philip Zimbardo (Biography + Experiments). She described to her colleagues what she'd done, remarking how several of her slower kids with brown eyes had transformed themselves into confident leaders of the class. On the second day, the roles were reversed, and those with brown eyes received special treatment, and the blue-eyed children were made to feel inferior (A Class, 2003). "It's happening every day in this country, right now," she said in an interview with Morning Edition. (She prefers the term "exercise.") Jane Elliott, a teacher and anti-racism activist, performed a direct experiment with the students in her classroom. she asked the children, who were white. The latter felt discriminated against by the other brown-eyed children. On the second day of the experiment, Elliott switched the childrens roles. Elliott had hoped that this experiment would help the children to better understand the feelings of discrimination that certain groups feel on a daily basis, but what she didn . Thats how it started, and thats how it went all day long. On April 4 1968, King was killed by the single . They didnt need to engage with a single Black person. The first day of the experiment she convinced the children that blue-eyed people were smarter, better and would have more priorities. "We'll just be a couple of minutes. She was a local girl and the other teachers were intimidated by her success. The results showed a . Would you like to find out? Mental Sandboxes and Their Usefulness in Today's World, The Law of Reversed Effort: When Taking Action Isn't the Best Option. What Lies Behind Your Urgent Need to Answer Work E Mails? Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, says Elliott's diversity training is "Orwellian" and singled her out as "the Torquemada of thought reform." The nonstop parade of sickening events such as the murder of George Floyd surely is not going to be abated by a quickie experiment led by a white person for the alleged benefit of other whites as was the case with the blue-eyed, brown eyed experiment. Blue-eyed people would get 5 extra minutes on the playground and blue-eyed people could not talk to brown-eyed people. Before she could answer, another boy piped up: "If she didn't have blue eyes, she'd be the principal or the superintendent.". Danko, M. (2013). But the protests happening now have given her hope. One scholar asserts that it is "Orwellian" and teaches whites "self-contempt." Website. "They are cleaner and they are smarter.". Professor of Journalism, University of Iowa. The empathy she works to inspire in students with the experiment, which has been modified over the years, is necessary, she said. ( 1985-03-26) " A Class Divided " is a 1985 episode of the PBS series Frontline. If brown-eyed children made a mistake, Elliott would call out the mistake and attribute it to the students brown eyes.
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