#a class divided

[dleondantes]

Ethics and Authority: Insights from A Class Divided

The Resilient Philosopher Introduction Watching the documentary A Class Divided forced me into an uncomfortable but necessary reflection on ethics. What it revealed is not confined to history. It is disturbingly present. Influence shapes the human mind far more than we are willing to admit, especially the minds of children. What authority normalizes, people absorb. What is rewarded becomes…

Ethics and Authority: Insights from A Class Divided

[theresilientphilosopher]

Ethics and Authority: Insights from A Class Divided

The Resilient Philosopher Introduction Watching the documentary A Class Divided forced me into an uncomfortable but necessary reflection on ethics. What it revealed is not confined to history. It is disturbingly present. Influence shapes the human mind far more than we are willing to admit, especially the minds of children. What authority normalizes, people absorb. What is rewarded becomes…

Ethics and Authority: Insights from A Class Divided

[willowsearth]

How Children Mirror the World Around Them: Lessons on Influence and Development

How do children learn to navigate the world? From teachers to TikTokers, kids mimic the people they trust and admire. Explore the powerful role of influence in shaping young minds and discover practical tips for fostering positive growth. #ChildDevelopmen

Imagine you’re walking through a park and you see a group of kids playing. One child starts leading a game, and soon, the others mimic their every move. They laugh the same way, copy their gestures, and even use the same phrases. It’s like watching little mirrors reflecting everything they see. This everyday scene captures a profound truth about children: they are impressionable and absorb…

How Children Mirror the World Around Them: Lessons on Influence and Development

[duskdrops]

A Class Divided

So my latest story arc with Haleigh and Kailani, I just wanted to showed the simmer community to accept everyone! Haleigh’s arc today was my own version of ‘A Class Divided’. ‘A Class Divided’ is a documentary about a teacher who shows her children what racism is like (because racism was extremely severe during that period and everyone knows that and it’s still severe but not extremely but we are getting better but not really since fucking Americans decided to put trump in power but I’m not going to judge because I’m not american and I can’t know their reasoning for everything.) In the documentary her third graders are almost traumatized by their fellow peers who assumed power. As adults the children still cling to that moment in their life and despise racism. My arc with Haleigh was supposed to be uploaded during BHM but my lazy ass can’t do anything right except judge others so it’s three days late. But with Haleigh it wasn’t just about race, I wanted it to represent acceptance of others regardless of race, gender, nationality, facial appearances and anything that makes them a fucking human being. I wanted the three girls to see how judgment could easily tear apart their friendship and that’s what happened. With Kailani it was more gender biased, I felt like in today’s society men are view with an extremely negative light and are kind of all group up in the same category. I wanted to showcase that all boys can be different and that they’re aren’t just hairy, brutish, sexist horndogs. I mean yeah, I met some of them but not all men/boys are raised liked that and it’s mostly due to the toxic masculinity brought to them at a young age by the adults around them. When a men shows anything about himself that isn’t masculine or fails to fit into the social quo, he is attacked and harassed by homophobia. As a society, we should be able to allow others to express themselves as they feel fit. Like it’s not that hard to leave another person alone and let them do fucking them. We are the human race and we can and will do whatever the fuck we please. So all I’ve been trying to say this whole time is: ACCEPT OTHERS!

[adventureinfilm]

blue v. brown

Young minds are soft and impressionable; the slightest influence is able to mold and form beliefs that can last a lifetime. Just as in Hearts of Hate, the 1985 Frontline documentary A Class Divided explores both how racism and prejudice is able to manifest itself in young minds and works to change the way people view racism on an institutionalized level. The episode, directed by William Peters, follows the outcome and effects of third-grade teacher Jane Elliott’s “Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes” experiment. A Class Divided brings in footage from the documentary The Eye of the Storm, in which Elliott experiment conducts an experiment on her third-grade class on the topic of prejudice and racial judgment, and footage from that same class’s reunion 15 years later. The episode also goes on to show Elliott performing that same experiment in the present day to a group of employees from a New York Correctional Facility.

A Class Divided gives me the same vibe that I get from Hearts of Hate, but in a less explicit way. In showing how easily the idea of prejudice can manifest itself in young 8-year olds, the documentary creates a sense of urgency and alarm towards how generations can potentially grow up with a flawed understanding of what is right and wrong if they do not understand empathy. In her experiment, Elliott segregates her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed students, giving the blue-eyed children preferential treatment and berating the brown-eyed children when they do anything wrong. The next day, the roles are switched with the brown-eyed students having the upper hand. In creating this divide, she is able to teach her students the unfairness of racial prejudice and the importance of equality. One of the more unique aspects of this film are that they bring in the children from the 1970s documentary The Eye of the Storm for a reunion to rewatch the film they partook in, and reflect back on what they have learned. This works because it shows the progression and impact of Elliott’s experiment on her students’ adult lives, further reinforcing the effectiveness of her work. The film uses a plethora of close-up and medium close-up shots to fully capture each students’ reactions to their previous selves, as well as each third-grader’s reaction to the experiment. This allows for better understanding of how profound the experiment truly was, and demonstrates to the audience the genuine emotional impact of Elliott’s lesson.

The second half of episode focuses on the same experiment done to the employees of a New York correctional facility; however, this set differs from the one done on the third-graders significantly. The privileged students in the third-grade class initiated their oppressive behaviour quite independently, whereas the privileged adults were prompted to behave in an unjust manner to the others. In addition, the oppressed adults demonstrated a much greater sense of rebelliousness as opposed to the oppressed third-graders. Although I found it slightly awkward to portray the experiments in two separate parts in the episode, in the end, it proved to be effective in comparing the outcomes of the two experiments, and how different factors play into the success of the experiment. The oppressed adults displayed greater indignance, perhaps because they had become so accustomed to their privilege and could recognize injustice towards them, but were not able to empathize as well or could not recognize injustice towards others - in contrast to the children, who had not experienced such a level of inequity before. I think the cinematic decision to show both the experiment done on the children and the one done on the adults was a great choice because it demonstrates just how effective the experiment is in getting Elliott’s message about prejudice across to the audience by showing how it impacts both children and grown adults.

8/10 - A Class Divided effectively explores the idea of institutionalized racism. In providing the follow-up to the subjects of the experiment, as well as comparing its effects between different age groups, Peters’s episode is able to coherently and powerfully demonstrate to the audience the idea of empathy and understanding, and how they can fight against hate and prejudice.

[lyfestile]

The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, a teacher in a small town in Iowa tried a daring classroom experiment. She decided to treat children with blue eyes as superior to children with brown eyes. FRONTLINE explores what those children learned about discrimination and how it still affects them today.

[balyhane]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

Video series from PBS being shown to my psych class. Others who follow me might find it interesting. Warning for disturbing scenes, analog racism etc etc. It’s a psych class, people, it’s not gonna be happy

[heyemmateach]

[Jane Elliot speaking] I hope [my students] know now and for all time that just because someone says something is true, just because society acts as though a fact were established doesn’t make it so. I want them to think, to reason, to question."

Page 104 A Class Divided: Then and Now by William Peters