Prejudice And Discrimination In The Movie A Class Divided

The movie “A Class Divided” was basically about a third grade teacher named Jane Elliot who taught little children and adults, a lesson of discrimination. The film has three parts the documentary, a reunion of the third graders, and the exercise with the correctional officers. She wanted to find a way to really get through to people what discrimination is because you don’t know what something is until you go through it. So she came up with this mechanism called the “blue-eye/brown-eye exercise because it played a role in demonstrating what prejudice and racism truly is. The whole idea arose because of the death of the famous civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. The children didn’t understand his death but they knew who he was because …show more content…
One of the men had said that it had felt good to be more important than the other group and that he actually hated what Ms. Elliot had put them through. A young lady had said, “Nobody likes to be looked down upon, humiliated, teased, or discriminated against” because at the time that’s how the exercise made her feel. Looking back Ms. Elliot ask her former students was the agony worth it and they all said it was. Out of all the responses she had received I think one students particularly stood out to her because she talked about how she was going to instill that racism is a bad thing and in her words, “If he see that mama and daddy like the black people that maybe he would think to himself that he would like them to”. Personally, I feel as though for you to teach a group of kids something so long ago that you would expect them to forget it but yet they pass it down and teach their kids right from wrong. It’s really a life changing exercise that can benefit not only children but adults as well because of the powerful message behind …show more content…
She later used it on a group of correctional officers which to me was amazing because you can see that this exercise has an effect on every age group. She broke them up in groups as usual and the lesson had begun. The brown-eyed people were superior on this day and that meant the blue-eyed people were going to be the ones getting discriminated against. Ms. Elliot told a blue-eyed lady to put her gum away and she stuck it up under her chair and then that’s when she started judging her. Ms. Elliot said things like “Now I 'd like for you to notice where she put her gum. You have this problem with blue-eyed people”. After that she just kept picking at them about not having their name son paper, not having a pencil, having poor listening skills and their ability to make eye contact .After the lesson was over they all sat and analyzed what had just happened to them. According, to them they hadn’t really been a victim of discrimination much in their lives. They talked about what they would do in their everyday lives if they saw someone being a victim of racism and one man said that he would have to do something about it because he couldn’t face his son knowing that he didn’t. One lady said that everyone has once in their life been discriminated against no matter what race they were and that she hope she would never have to be put in the situation again. I think that they all walked out the room with a