Note that the blue eyes-brown eyes experiment started with her students. I think she taught third grade, so 8 and 9 year-olds. There’s whole documentaries on the experiment and what the kids learned and how it effected them later in life. Her expirement is one of the few things I actually remember from my high school psychology class.
This is from the Wikipedia article on Elliott:
“First exercise involving eye color and brown collars[edit]
Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom, (referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.) he asked “Why’d they shoot that King?” After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them how they think it feels to be a black boy or girl. She suggested to the class that it would be hard for them to understand discrimination without experiencing it themselves and then asked the children if they would like to find out. The children agreed with a chorus of “yeah"s. She decided to base the exercise on eye color rather than skin color in order to show the children what racial segregation would be like.[2]
On the first day of the exercise, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method to easily identify the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess. The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit in the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyed children and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the exercise’s rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize a point.
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott lied to the children by stating that melanin was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy, and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades on simple tests were better, and they completed mathematical and reading tasks that had seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children who scored more poorly on tests, and even during recess isolated themselves, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.[6]
The next Monday,[2] Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed children in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars. To reflect on the experience, she asked the children to write down what they had learned.[2]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott#First_exercise_involving_eye_color_and_brown_collars
http://www.janeelliott.com/
Sorry I made this post so long. But I love her. And this is important.
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