Topic > Discrimination in A Class Divided by Jane Elliot

Discrimination has been one of the great global problems that has been created over too many years. On April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a third-grade teacher in a small town in Riceville, Iowa, named Jane Elliot, knew she had to do something. Since the students were all confused and didn't understand why someone like the King would be killed, he decided to teach them a unique lesson about discrimination. Fourteen years later, Frontline recorded a reunion of that third-grade class of 1970 and called it A Class Divided. Jane Elliott discovered how much her lesson had influenced students' lives and attitudes by watching and discussing the film together. Jane Elliott subjects them to an experiment in which she divided her students into two groups, children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes. The experiment took place over two days. On the first day, she told and made the children with blue eyes feel like they were better and smarter than those with brown eyes since she also had blue eyes. Brown-eyed children had to wear collars so everyone could see who was who. It gave children with blue eyes more privileges, such as giving them more time to play and allowing them to drink from drinking fountains, while those with brown eyes had to drink from plastic cups. She also said they can't play with others, which separates them and makes them feel alone. On the second day he changed places and the roles were reversed. The children with blue eyes were no longer better than the children with brown eyes and it fell to the children with brown eyes to be better than the children with blue eyes. He did this to help all the students who have experienced discrimination You 2. His lesson had a huge impact on the children regarding discrimination as... halfway through the paper... it only took them two and a half minutes. We can also see that the Tu 4 blue-eyed and brown-eyed children were in common at that point. Whoever had the superior eye color that day is always better than the other. The experiment used by Jane Elliott was to help children understand prejudice and discrimination. Now they have received a lesson about it that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. This is not an example of how just the class behaved, but of how people in real life still behave sometimes today. Children have also created their own society, a society where everyone is treated equally as if they were their brothers. I learned from the film that this experiment simply demonstrates how discrimination really affects people's self-esteem. People will take advantage of their superiority and somehow immediately turn their backs on other people.