story time - discrimination teachings in a third grade classroom in the ‘60s
my sister just showed me a video of this teacher in the ‘60s teaching her students about discrimination. It was a little social experiment that taught kids that just because someone has a different skin colour, that doesn’t mean they're bad people. This experiment went on for two days. Here’s how it went (mind you, this took place in the ‘60s. the students were segregated by the colour of their skin):
Tuesday morning - the teacher asks her students how they’d feel if they were judged by the colour of their skin. The students say they don’t know because it’s never happened before. Miss teacher lady over here says “Okay, what about your eyes? Say you were judged by the colour of your eyes. Blue eyed people would be higher up and brown eyed people would not.” she grabbed these felt collars that fit like a small, thin scarf and gave one to every student with brown eyes. She also told her class that the brown eyed students wouldn’t be able to play with the blue eyed students. They wouldn’t be able to play on the playground like the blue eyed kids would.
Tuesday afternoon - the teacher asks what the students thought about today and a little boy speaks up. “[I don’t remember this kid’s name-] called me a name!” he says, and the teach asks what he called the boy. “He called me Brown Eyes!” The teacher nods her head and says “What’s so wrong about that? You do have brown eyes.” the boy looks at her with a more neutral look than anything and responds with what you might answer as a third grader in this experiment (because this was a third grade class. sorry, I forgot to add that). “It means that I’m dumber! He called me brown eyes and that means I’m dumber.” then the other brown eyed kids start joining in and agreeing with him.
Wednesday morning - the teacher tells her students that she lied the day before. “The brown eyed children are actually the higher ups. Sorry, I lied to you yesterday. Everyone with a collar, take yours off and place it on someone with blue eyes.” she tells her class. The students with brown eyes obey this order and, very happily, go on to place their collar on someone else.
Wednesday afternoon - the teacher calls the students up by the colour of their eyes to go through a deck of cards (they did this the day before as well). the students with blue eyes yesterday got a good time (about three minutes). Today, their end time was 4 minutes and 18 seconds. The brown eyed children’s time yesterday was 5 and a half minutes. Today’s time was 2 and a half minutes. The teacher asked both groups what happened. The answer through both groups was “we kept thinking about the collars.” At the end of this day, the teacher took the collars from the kids and asked them a very important question. “Would you judge people by the colour of their skin?” After everything, their answer was “NO!”
This was taught to a third grade class in the ‘60s where discrimination was present. The reason of this experiment was to teach little 8 year olds about how discrimination was bad. This was the best thing to ever happen in a classroom ever. Why can’t we do this again?
