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Many critics that the children were too young to understand the exercise. Thats how it started, and thats how it went all day long. She has made statements about the increase in hate crimes and racism in recent years. Jane Elliots work and experiences have made her an authority on education and anti-racism. Thousands of educators across the United States folded the experiment into their curriculums. She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students. Blue Eyed versus Brown Eyed Students Jane Elliott was not a psychologist, but she developed one of the most famously controversial exercises in 1968 by dividing students into a blue-eyed group and . What can be changed to make the blue eyes and brown eyes experiment "It's Riceville 30 years ago. Elliott and I were sitting at her dining room table. 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. Advertising Notice (2010). Open Document. They were also relevant in the 1950s when Elliott first began this work. Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George WashingtonUniversity, says the exercise helps develop character and empathy. On Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, TN. The publication of compositions which the children had written about the experience in the local . She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. The test also included violation of consent in which participation of the children was made involuntarily. 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. Your Privacy Rights Jane Elliott was a third grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa when she developed the Blue Eyed/ Brown Eyed exercise to teach the effects of racism. In the early morning, dew and fog cover the acres of gently swaying stalks that surround Riceville the way water surrounds an island. "She taught in this school for 18 years." Ethics + Religion; Health; Politics + Society; . These differences lead to war and hate. She told them brown-eyed . The brown-eyed students also exercised a certain level of power over the blue-eyed students when they put the armbands on them. After the local newspaper published a story on Elliott and the experiment, she was flown to New York to appear on May 31, 1968, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where she extolled the experiments effectiveness in cluing in her 8-year-old white students on what it was like to be Black in America. Why do researchers use correlational studies? If you had a good German name, but you had brown eyes, they threw you into the gas chamber because they thought you might be a Jewish person who was trying to pass. They also harassed them constantly. "There's a sense of renewal here that I've never seen anywhere else," Elliott says. We use them to divide and destroy people., On Understanding The Different Ways We Treat Other Races, Philip Zimbardo (Biography + Experiments). 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 . ABC broadcast a documentary about her work. ", Elliott replied, "Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?". The Anti-Racism Exercise That Taught Kids to Be Racist - Gizmodo You give them something nice and they just wreck it." Even though the response to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise was initially negative, it made Jane Elliott a leading figure in diversity training. she asked the children, who were white. "You can see the look on their faces. Social Emotional Learning Lessons for Jane Elliott - Advancement Courses Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue . The demonstration has since been taught by generations of teachers to millions of kids across the country. Jane Elliot's experiment involves cheating and intentional misinterpretation of facts. Jane Elliot's 'The Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes Experiment' was unethical in that she created a segregated environment in a third grade classroom. Elliott is nothing if not stubborn. 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. Basically, you establish differences between a set of subjects in order to divide them into separate groups. "I don't think this community was ready for what she did," he said. Blue-eyed children got five extra minutes of recess. Consequently, the brown-eyed children started using blue-eyes as an insult. It was the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 that Elliott ran her first "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise in her Riceville, Iowa classroom. The basic idea was to separate the class into two halves, students with blue eyes and those with brown. In 1970, a documentary about the exercise was released. She said she watched and was horrified at what she saw. She decided to continue the exercise with her students after lunch. To Kill A Mockingbird Quotes - 1072 Words | Internet Public Library The exercise is "an inoculation against racism," she says. "Probably because they have been taught how they're treated in this country that they have to understand us. Ms. Elliott, now 87, said she started teaching about racism on April 5, 1968 the day after the Rev. She wanted to show her students that an arbitrarily established difference could separate them and pit them against each other. I was stunned. To back up my statement Bloom (2005) says Jane Elliott's blue-eyes brown-eyes exercise encouraged children to mistrust authority figures. Outside, rows of corn stretched to the horizon. Jane Elliot's Famous Classroom Experiment: How Eye Color - Thriveworks PracticalPsychology. Ethical Principles of Psychologists & Code of Conduct - StudyMode The blue eye brown eye experiment. Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes: The Jane Decent Essays. The secretary on duty looked up, startled, as if she had just seen a ghost. One caller complained that white children would not be able to handle the exercise and would be seriously damaged by the exercise. When Sarah, the Elliotts' oldest daughter, went to the girls' bathroom in junior high, she came out of a stall to see a message scrawled in red lipstick on the mirror: "Nigger lover.". A second look at the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment that taught third Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes by Stephen G. Bloom - Hardcover - University of ", Others have praised Elliott's exercise. Tears formed in the corners of Elliott's eyes. 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. Elliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. "It would be hard to know, wouldn't it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Did We Fail the Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes ExperimentOr Did It Fail Us? Elliotts bullying rejoinder to any nonbeliever was to say that however much pain a white person felt after one or two days of made-up discrimination was nothing when compared to what Blacks endure daily. 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 documentary has become a popular teaching tool among teachers, business owners, and even employees at correctional facilities. In this scenario, students are told brown-eyed people . The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 was also an event that spurred educators to action, motivating one teacher to try out a bold experiment touted to reduce racism. According to the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, 2010 the experiment also violates the principle of Integrity. Before she could answer, another boy piped up: "If she didn't have blue eyes, she'd be the principal or the superintendent.". PracticalPie.com is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. "Do blue-eyed people remember what they've been taught?" 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. one girl asked. She says its because racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ethnocentrism are mean and nasty. . Two education professors in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, suggest that Elliott's experiment was unethical because the participants weren't informed of its real purpose beforehand. It also documents small-town White America's reflex reaction to the . Elliott created the blue-eyes/brown-eyes classroom exercise in 1968 to teach students about racism. If brown-eyed children made a mistake, Elliott would call out the mistake and attribute it to the students brown eyes. Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. In Zimbardo's experiment the conditions were much more controlled for later study but the r. The children said yes, and the exercise began. They are cleaner than blue-eyed people. "She could get kids to do anything she wanted them to," he says of Elliott. Fourteen years later, the students featured in The Eye of the Storm reunited and discussed their experiences with Elliott. That's what it feels like when you're discriminated against.". The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the "Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment" she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. 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." Many of them noted that when they hear prejudice and discrimination from others, they wish they could whip out those collars and give them the experience they had as third graders.