Jane Elliott takes place next to names such as Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, Maria Montessori in the “American Encyclopedia of Educational History”. Okay but why?
Jane Elliott was a primary school teacher in a conservative and racist Iowa town of whites only. Each month she introduced her students to people who had accomplished great things. The previous month, she had introduced Luther King, and students had chosen him as "Hero of the Month". When Elliott turns on the television on Thursday evening in April 1968, she is stunned by the images of the assassination of Luther King.
None of the students had ever come face-to-face with a black person in their lives. She also saw a black person for the first time in her life when she was 19 years old. An idealistic teacher, Elliot, plans an unusual experiment: She tells the kids they're going to play a game and divides the kids in her class into two groups based on eye color.
Jane Elliott (born November 30, 1933) is an American diversity educator. As a schoolteacher, she became known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class[a] on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Publication in the local newspaper of compositions the children had written about the experience led to much broader media interest.
She puts a band on the arm of a blue-eyed person. Then she begins to explain to the children that brown-eyed people are smarter and better than blue-eyed people. She explains to children that the pigment cells that make up the color of the eyes affect intelligence, accompanied by so-called scientific data. Elliott then lets the brown-eyed group go to lunch first and enjoy a longer recess.
As the group favoritism continues, brown-eyed children become more self-confident and become more condescending, even insulting, towards blue-eyed children. Blue-eyed children make more mistakes and become shy and depressed. Not even Elliot could have guessed that kids could get this far in such a short time! The change in students is surprising.
A smart blue-eyed girl, although she knew the multiplication tables well before, now starts to make a lot of mistakes. On the other hand, even the slowest learners of brown-eyed people with reading difficulties start to read with big smiles on their faces without faltering.
Later, Jane Elliott tells that she made a mistake in the information she gave and that the blue-eyed students are actually superior "scientifically". The armbands are swapped. However, the blue-eyed ones who have the upper hand do not mistreat their friends. Because they don't want to let them live their own life!
Elliot, all these events are actually fiction, white people's racial discrimination against blacks; She explains that she arranged this experiment so that they could understand how it was felt by Negroes. She asks her students to write an essay sharing their feelings to be delivered to King's wife, Coretta King. The children wrote “How Does Discrimination Make People Feel?” published in the local newspaper.
The documentary "Eye Of The Storm", aired on ABC in 1971 and chronicled the experiment, won the Peabody Award. Jane Elliott takes place next to names such as Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, and Maria Montessori in the “American Encyclopedia of Educational History”. However, despite all these successes, Elliot is forced to leave her school, job, and town in 1980 due to the pressure and insults she receives from the townspeople.
With this experiment, Jane Elliott wants to show that discrimination does not exist by itself, but is produced by people to separate and divide people. The “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment” has an important place in the history of social psychology.
The lesson of a Lifetime
Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/