Part A
1. What was your initial reaction to viewing the footage of this experiment?
Initially I felt taken back by the fact this experiment was used on 3rd graders. It seemed as those the children took to it quickly and began to adopt the same feelings the teacher was projecting about the brown eyed students. I did also find it far more educational to see the experiment carried out, rather then just reading about it. The students quickly formed opinions based on their classmates in the matter of a second, solely because the teacher said they were not as “good” as them. My wife grew up on a reservation, in upstate NY. She often said in the early 90’s other kids didn’t like her, were not allowed to her as it was on a reservation and I never could comprehend how there would be any type of discrimination between children this small, this experiment showed that children can easily be taught racism by the adults in their life.
2. What values and ethical issues did the experiment express? …show more content…
The children were being taught implicit bias, they were told in the beginning that brown eyed children were not as smart, so then the blue-eyed students responded negatively to their classmates, and vice versa when the day changed to brown eyed students being superior. At the very core of the experiment was the issue of discrimination, in this case discriminating based on the color of the children’s eyes. The brown then blued eye children were being unjustly discriminated upon as lessen then based solely on their physical appearance. Another huge ethical issue I saw was institutional racism, which was being done by the teacher enforcing rules that would hinder either the brown or blued eye student, in a attempt to put them behind their more worthy
1. What was your initial reaction to viewing the footage of this experiment?
Initially I felt taken back by the fact this experiment was used on 3rd graders. It seemed as those the children took to it quickly and began to adopt the same feelings the teacher was projecting about the brown eyed students. I did also find it far more educational to see the experiment carried out, rather then just reading about it. The students quickly formed opinions based on their classmates in the matter of a second, solely because the teacher said they were not as “good” as them. My wife grew up on a reservation, in upstate NY. She often said in the early 90’s other kids didn’t like her, were not allowed to her as it was on a reservation and I never could comprehend how there would be any type of discrimination between children this small, this experiment showed that children can easily be taught racism by the adults in their life.
2. What values and ethical issues did the experiment express? …show more content…
The children were being taught implicit bias, they were told in the beginning that brown eyed children were not as smart, so then the blue-eyed students responded negatively to their classmates, and vice versa when the day changed to brown eyed students being superior. At the very core of the experiment was the issue of discrimination, in this case discriminating based on the color of the children’s eyes. The brown then blued eye children were being unjustly discriminated upon as lessen then based solely on their physical appearance. Another huge ethical issue I saw was institutional racism, which was being done by the teacher enforcing rules that would hinder either the brown or blued eye student, in a attempt to put them behind their more worthy