Blue-Eyed People Experiment

The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Jane Elliot knew that simply telling and preaching to her third-graders against discrimination was not enough. According to Elliot, ”the shooting of Martin Luther King . . . could not just be talked about and explained away. There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa” ("A Class Divided" 1985), so she conducted a two-day experiment. On the first day of the experiment, the students were told that blue-eyed people are "better" than brown-eyed people. They were told by Mrs. Elliot, the authoritative figure of the classroom, that brown-eyed people are inferior to blue-eyed people and that they need to wear collars so it would be easy to distinguish who had brown eyes. …show more content…
They also get five minutes less of a recess and cannot play with the superior, blue-eyed classmates. Mrs. Elliott was shocked at how quick her third-graders have turned. She goes on to say, “I watched wonderful, thoughtful children, turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders.” On the second day of the experiment, the tables have turned; Mrs. Elliot declared that brown-eyed people are superior to the blue-eyed people. According to the film, 17 years have passed, Riceville has not changed much, ”it's still all white and all Christian. And though Jane Elliott has continued to teach her lesson in discrimination, there has been little outward local reaction: no objections from school authorities or the parents of the 300-odd students who have by now been through it’” (“A Class Divided” 1985). I think the Jane Elliott's lesson was remarkable because it created true awareness about prejudice and racism not only among children but throughout communities. In fact, her experiment "has been widely used with students and teachers - and by the government, business, and labor organizations concerned about human relations” (“A Class Divided”