A Class Divided By Jane Elliot

The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, a teacher named Jane Elliott tried a classroom experiment on her third grade children in a small town in the United States. Elliott decided to treat the children with blue eyes differently to children with brown eyes. Her experiment was designed to demonstrate to her students how prejudice and racism feels and why it’s so wrong.

From here, we witness some of superior blue eyed kids began to act arrogant and bossy to the inferior brown eyed kids. Blue eyed Russell was taunting John at recess, calling him ‘brown eyes’ and John retaliated by hitting him. After the two boys fought at recess the teacher asked if responding with violence made him feel better, he replied no. His answer goes to show that responding with violence is ineffective and a waste of time and energy. They compared it to someone calling a black man the N-word.

“A Class Divided”: When asked the question, “do you think you know how it feels to be judged by the color of your skin”, a few felt that they did. Initially the children were excited to participate in the blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment, until they realized they would be the people being judged. Once the teacher announced that the blue-eyed people are the “better people” than the brown-eyed children, immediately voiced their disagreement. One blue-eyed boy stated, “My dad has brown eyes and he’s not stupid.”

Jane’s special project sparked when she told her young class of eight and nine year olds that blue-eyed people were smarter and were better than brown-eyed people. Blue-eyed children were allowed an extra five minutes at recess, could have extras at lunch, got to sit in the front of the classroom, and were greatly applauded for their successes. On the opposite spectrum, brown-eyed students were forced to wear navy fabric collars in order to be easily identified. The groups were forced into segregation and were not allowed to play with one another out on the playground. Even when a brown-eyed student is tormented, the exercise continues; it is all a part of the experiment. The next day, the children switched roles, allowing them to all comprehend the degrading and humiliating emotional aspects of being an “outsider”.

The white people are the ones with blue eyes and hence she ranked them lower to make them feel how in everyday lives African Americans feel when they are being labelled as lower to whites. She purposely switched their roles so that they would start having empathy for one another. This was the first-time blue eyed people were told that they are lower than brown eyed people. Since whites are always considered superior in society due to their color, they never got a chance to feel what it is like to be black and thus being labelled as a low status. The label of a low-status reduces the position of an individual in society and causes the society to actively limit their rights. This exercise was more effective in children than in adults. Some white people rejected Jane Elliot's idea that stated brown eyed people are superior than blue eyed people. Therefore, they misbehaved and questioned how she herself feels when told she is lower than the brown eyed

For the children, it was easy for them to believe anything they were taught because they were so young. Everything Mrs. Elliott told them they believed it and tried to live it in that moment. The blue-eyed children thought they were better and acted as if they were better. As the children stated, at the playground the blue-eyed children taunted the brown-eyed children all because of the labels that were taught to them. With the prison guards, it was a little harder for them to accept the things they were being taught. Whenever a blue-eyed person would get irritated with Jane Elliot, the would react in a defensive manner. In return, she used that against them saying that only blue-eyed people would act that way. I believe in the moment, for both groups the labels became true. Essentially, it demonstrates how something negative or positive can change a

I am amazingly acquainted with the A Class Divided film and a tremendous promoter for Jane Elliott. Elliott settled on a disputable choice by making one kind of lesson arrangement for her third grade class to share in after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Her lesson in segregation pulls at viewers feelings and is significantly more powerful on the genuine members. We likewise saw situations in which Elliott utilized the same activities on grown-ups and undergrads with the same results. Bigotry and partiality are still issues that minorities, ladies, and elderly individuals must manage consistently. Elliot's activity not just puts Caucasian people in an uncomfortable position, however it drives them to feel the adverse impacts of outlandish bias. These movies can and ought to be utilized as a part of school and secondary school classrooms to instruct America's childhood about separation and how our general public can free itself of this issue.

A Class Divided is about a 3rd grade class and their teacher. The teacher is passionately against racism and wants to inspire change. The day after Martin Luther King Jr. died she has the courage to start. She introduces the idea that blue-eyed people are better to her 3rd grade class and spends the whole day reinforcing that mindset. She gives biased examples of why the blue-eyed children are better, pointing out every mistake a brown-eyed child makes. She makes rules for the brown-eyed children to follow, telling them they can’t get seconds at lunch, play with the blued eyed children, or use the water fountain. She even goes so far as to give them collars to wear so that they are distinguished from a distance. The children follow along without

Jane Elliots famous experiment a Class Divided,  was inspired by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The teacher, Mrs Elliot  thought this exercise to help her students comprehend the effects of racism and prejudice. Back in 1962, immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. ,Jane Elliott experimented on teaching her third grade students about discrimination . For two days, she  made each of them experience real discrimination through provoking stereotyping and prejudice with usage of social psychological phenomena like cognitive errors, self-perceptions. Elliott first created stereotyping situation among the children by separating them into two groups by easily recognized physical traits as blue eyes and brown

Social Dialogue There were moments in time when we were growing up, that we thought our parents would not listen to us, understand us, or hear our side of the story and vice versa. Our parents would constantly tell us what to do, and we may not do what we were being told the first few times and it just to our parents it seems as if we just never listen. They would talk and their words would go in one ear out the other. In Lisa Delpit's "The Silenced Dialogue”, Delpit interviewed a few school and university teachers and administrators.

This documentary was an exercise in response to the assassination of Dr King. Jane Elliot a third grade teacher from Iowa decided it was time to create a microcosm society after Martin Luther king Jr was killed. She performed this experiment in two separate places between kids in her all white Christian school and between adults at an Iowa State prison system on human relations. This came after they had made him a “heroes of the month for the month of February at the middle school which she teaches at. She tried to figure out a way to explain this scenario to her third grade student as to why Martin Luther King was assassinated. Jane Elliot decided to use the eye color experiment where she placed people with blue eye and brown eyes in separate groups and see how each group function when they’re discriminated against. The result of the experiment helped bring people closer as brothers and led people to understand how it felt to be discriminated against. Although Mrs. Elliot carried out this experiment with a different class of people, it would have been great to run this with

Martin Luther King have to die”. Jane Elliott did not know exactly how to explain that to an 8 year old. That is when Jane Elliott had came up with the “Class Divided” experiment.The purpose of the “Class divided” experiment was to teach children about racism. Jane Elliott was convinced that the best way to tackle the problem was to divide her class into two groups. One group was just with blue eyed children and the other group was with brown eyed children. When it was the brown eyes childrens turn Jane Elliott told the brown eyes that they can take their colors off and put it on whichever blue eye

People should show respect to each other although they are different races. Several years ago in America, many black people in schools were often discriminated against and ostracized. Known from the film Freedom Writers, those at-risk students all lived pretty tough life due to their color of skin. On the one hand, these students in the class were split up based on race. During school, most of them were treated unfairly by teachers. On the other hand, these students did not show respect to Ms. Gruwell——their new teacher, because she is a white people. Students always late for class and they did not care about what Ms. Gruwell

She pointed out flaws of the brown-eyed group and seemingly better traits of the blue-eyed group that made her statement seem correct leading to a generalized prejudice. Elliot then made rules for the groups, including that of recess time, drinking fountain privileges, lunch privileges, and segregation on the playground, giving advantages to the superior blue-eyed group and disadvantages to the inferior brown-eyed group which is a small-scale simulation of societal and governmental oppression of minorities. The kids laughed at the “other 's” misfortune, two kids of each group got into a fight, and hateful things were said by the “good” group while a look and feel of disappointment, shame, and exclusion was shown by the “bad” group. The roles were effectively reversed on the second day by using the same methods. The brown-eyed group were more than happy to give their collars to the blue-eyed group. The situated identities of the children were changed by Jane Elliot, an authority figure, by declaring that people of one eye color were better than people of another. She pointed out flaws and supposed shortcomings that made the one group seem inferior and the other group adopted this generalized view. This turned into discriminatory rules and acts in the class and on the playground.

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. Jane divided the class into 9 brown eyes and 9 blue eyes. The students who had blue eyes were told that they were better and smarter than their inferior brown-eyed peers. Brown-eyed students were given punishments and told that they could not interact with the blue-eyed students; this lead to pupils withdrawing, becoming confused, angry, and sad. The blue-eyed students were delighted in knowing that they were the superior group and took full advantage of it.