Carson asked, grinning. Watch it online right now! The brown-eyed children didnt want to play with the blue-eyes during recess. While Jane Elliot's experiment makes several assumptions, it also has some ethical concerns. "I think these children walked in a colored child's moccasins for a day," she was quoted as saying. ", A chorus of "Yeahs" went up, and so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. Her class, PracticalPsychology. Some residents were furious. When my grandchildren are old enough, I'd give anything if you'd try the exercise out on them. Sign up for Politics Weekly.]. It has since evolved into an online blog and YouTube channel providing mental health advice, tools, and academic support to individuals from all backgrounds. Although Jane Elliot's intentions were to teach the youngsters about racism, ethical issues related to the simulation were raised. "Would you like to come on the show?" Most Riceville residents seem to have an opinion of Elliott, whether or not they've met her. SpeedyPaper website, please click below to request its removal: Liked this essay sample but need an original one? "He's a bluey! Its not true and its not fair no matter what you say! he responded. Given the ethical concerns, will you still rely on a quasi-experimental research design as a source of information in counselling psychology? Order from one of our vetted writers instead. She left teaching in the mid-80s to speak publicly about the experience and the impact of prejudice and racism. Exploring your mind Blog about psychology and philosophy. Jane Elliott and Dr. On April 5 1968 the day after the death of Martin Luther King Jr Elliott decided to show her students how easy it was to be influenced by racism. There were more brown-eyed students in the room. She asks them if they have ever faced treatment like the type that blue-eyed people would experience in the following two and a half hours. Folks leave their cars unlocked, keys in the ignition. Yes, the children felt angry, hurt, betrayed. In a grassy front yard down the block is a hand-lettered sign: "Glads for Sale, 3 for $1." The demonstration has since been taught by generations of teachers to millions of kids across the country. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. One of the blue eyed even went to hit a brown eyed just for the fact that he was brown eyed. Withdrawn brown-eyed kids were suddenly outgoing, some beaming with the widest smiles she had ever seen on them. All rights reserved. Scores of others did participate. Elliott shared the essays with her mother, who showed them to the editor of the weekly Riceville Recorder. Youve probably heard different versions of it. Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George WashingtonUniversity, says the exercise helps develop character and empathy. Everyone's tired of her. It is a must . Once indoors, the brown-eyed group was then treated to coffee and doughnuts, while the blue-eyed group could only stand around and wait. One key assumption is that the sample population represents an actual society. The basic idea was to separate the class into two halves, students with blue eyes and those with brown. Fourteen years later, the students featured in The Eye of the Storm reunited and discussed their experiences with Elliott. Is your time best spent reading someone elses essay? "You can see the look on their faces. The corn grows so fast in northern Iowafrom seedling to seven-foot-high stalk in 12 weeksthat it crackles. ABC broadcast a documentary about her work. Elliott and I were sitting at her dining room table. She asked them if they would like to experience what it felt like to be in a person of colors shoes. But in reality, I found in researching for my book Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes that the experiment was a sadistic exhibition of power and authority levers controlled by Elliott. "I think third grade was too young for what she did. Initial Reaction to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise. Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The results were the same. Jane Elliott, a teacher and anti-racism activist, performed a direct experiment with the students in her classroom. "Your son got what he deserved," the woman said. The blue eyes brown eyes study was a study on group prejudice and discrimination conducted by Jane Elliot. In the most uncomfortable moments, Elliott reminds the students of violent acts caused by racism or homophobia. Society made them believe they were better than other people for arbitrary reasons such as skin color or gender. This technique allows researchers to show how many different traits are necessary to create defined groups, and then analyze the subjects behavior within their groups. According to the article is Jane Elliot's experiment to small degree effective. The Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment. Kids on top would tease the children who were deemed as the inferior group. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. ", We stopped on Woodlawn Avenue, and a woman in her mid-40s approached us on the sidewalk. On the second day of the experiment, Elliott switched the childrens roles. Basically, you establish differences between a set of subjects in order to divide them into separate groups. Elliott had hoped that this experiment would help the children to better understand the feelings of discrimination that certain groups feel on a daily basis, but what she didn . Elliott created the blue-eyes/brown-eyes classroom exercise in 1968 to teach students about racism. Children often fight, argue, and sometimes hit each other, but this time they were motivated by eye color. She was hesitant to enroll in Elliotts workshop but was told that if she wanted to succeed as a manager, shed have to attend. She also made the brown-eyed students put construction paper armbands on the blue-eyed students. "It would be hard to know, wouldn't it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. The experiment known as Blue Eyes Brown Eyes experiment is regarded as an eye-opening way for children to learn about racism and discrimination. She wanted to show her students that an arbitrarily established difference could separate them and pit them against each other. I'm tired of hearing about her and her experiment and how everyone here is a racist. On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott's third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. You give them something nice and they just wreck it." Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue . The blue-eyed girl apologized. Looking back, I think part of the problem was that, like the residents of other small midwestern towns I've covered, many in Riceville felt that calling attention to oneself was poor manners, and that Elliott had shone a bright light not just on herself but on Riceville; people all over the United States would think Riceville was full of bigots. Now, almost four decades later, Elliott's experiment still mattersto the grown children with whom she experimented, to the people of Riceville, population 840, who all but ran her out of town, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an exercise based on the experiment. She split the class in two categories, according to eye color, and told the children that one group was superior to the others. The Hangout Bar & Grill, the Riceville Pharmacy and ATouch of Dutch, a restaurant owned by Mennonites, line Main Street. And what she did caused an uproar. Introduction. She began this work in In her article, Peggy McIntosh compares the "white privilege" to an invisible set of unearned rewards and . Brown-eyed people. Jane would get invited to go to Timbuktu to give a speech. Zimbardocreator of the also controversial 1971 Stanford Prisoner Experiment, which was stopped after college student volunteers acting as "guards" humiliated students acting as "prisoners"says Elliott's exercise is "more compelling than many done by professional psychologists. ", Others have praised Elliott's exercise. ", Elliott replied, "Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?". Jane Elliott, Creator of the "Blue/Brown Eyes" Experiment, Says Racism Is Easy To Fix. Unfortunately, you cant copy samples. Elliott asked. Regardless of age, gender, race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, decision making in psychology should protect individual rights and welfare to eliminate potential biases. On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy theywere. Weve been here before, with unsettling and disturbing results. "How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children," one said. (She prefers the term "exercise.") Lasting Impact of Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment, Words are the most powerful weapon devised by humankind. How can we teach kids to be more like him? See Page 1. That got the other teachers angry. Why do researchers use correlational studies? Mental Sandboxes and Their Usefulness in Today's World, The Law of Reversed Effort: When Taking Action Isn't the Best Option. PracticalPie.com is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment Ethical? Grasping for a scientific explanation, she ended up claiming that melanin makes eyes darker, and makes . I got to have five minutes extra of recess." "They shot that King yesterday. That says very plainly that you know whats happening, you know you dont want it for you. Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment Ethical? Elliott flew to the NBC studio in New York City. Jane Elliott, shown here in 2009, remains an outspoken advocate against racism. Blue-eyed students slumped in their chairs, as though . The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking . Traditionally, society has always treated leadership as a male issue. It also documents small-town White America's reflex reaction to the . "She got carried away by this possession she developed over human beings. Elliott separated her all-white class of students into two groups: blue-eyed children and brown-eyed children. The arbitrary division among the students intensified over the course of the experiment, so much so that it actually ended in physical violence. They didnt need to engage with a single Black person. Elliott was even brought on The Tonight Show to talk about her experiences. "Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. With this experiment she wanted to let the blue-eyed people (white people) feel how it is to be in low power position. . Elliot's approach to the experiment involved creativity in which the pupils' age and ability to comprehend discrimination was taken into account. In the 60s, the United States was in the midst of a social race crisis. Directed by William Peters, the episode profiles the Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliott and her class of third graders, who took part in a class exercise about discrimination and prejudice in 1970 and reunited in the present day to recall the experience. The May 25 killing of George Floyd set off weeks of nationwide protests over the police abuse and racism against black people, plunging the U.S. into a reckoning of racial inequality. "We want to see Room No. The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring . Elliott asked her students to write about their experiences for the local newspaper. APA principles acknowledge that individuals rights to privacy, self-determination, and confidentiality is paramount to all psychological activities. According to role theorist Erving Goffman, emotional and cognitive experiences in such experiments as the Blue-Eyed versus the Brown-Eyed can have a long-term influence on behaviors and attitudes of participants especially when they are made to play the role of a stigmatized group (Biddle, 2013). They embraced the experiments reductive message, as well as its promised potential, thereby keeping the implausible rationale of Elliotts crusade alive and well for decades, however flawed and racist it really was. The smell of the crops and loam and topsoil and manure wafted though the open door. She told them that people with brown eyes were better than people with blue eyes. They were forced to sit on the back rows and had to use a . She asked the other teachers what they were doing to bring news of the King assassination into their classrooms. Ms. Elliott, now 87, said she started teaching about racism on April 5, 1968 the day after the Rev. Kellen Castineiras PSY Dr. Gail C. Flanagan February 6, 2022. . Jane Elliot's experiment involves cheating and intentional misinterpretation of facts. Jane divided the class into 9 brown eyes and 9 blue eyes. View Module 2 Discussion_ Are We Still Divided_ Blue Eyes_Brown Eyes_ A 3rd Grade Lesson for Us All.pdf from HUMN 330 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. 1. The fact that children are easy to manipulate into acting in a particular manner explains Jane's choice of sample. Kors writes that Elliott's exercise taught "blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites," adding that "in her view, nothing has changed in America since the collapse of Reconstruction." "People of other color groups seem to understand," she said. "She said, on the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, 'I don't know why you're doing that I thought it was about time somebody shot that son of a bitch,' " she said. "We'll just be a couple of minutes. Sorry, but it's not possible to copy the text due to security reasons. (2022, Apr 06). hide caption. In 1968, schoolteacher Jane Elliott decided to divide her classroom into students with blue eyes and students with brown eyes. In 1968 after Martin Luther King was assassinated the United States was in turmoil. "Maybe the way to sell the exercise would have been to invite the parents in, to talk about what she'd be doing. One teacher ended up displaying the same bigotry Elliott had spent the morning trying to fight. They all either smiled or laughed and nodded.". The children were not aware of the experiment, and therefore they could not give their permission of involvement. It's cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage. Questioning authority The mainstream media were complicit in advancing such a simplistic narrative. Through this study, Elliot demonstrated how easy it is for prejudice and discrimination to emerge from just a simple message that people with one eye color are superior to people with another eye color. They are more civilized than blue-eyed people. But Elliotts experiment had a more sinister impact. Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. She has since refused to answer any of my inquiries. Is your time best spent reading someone elses essay? In this documentary, Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher divided her class into two groups based on their eye color; one group had blue eyes and the other had brown eyes. Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage. They killed hundreds of thousands of people based on eye color alone, thats the reason I used eye color for my determining factor that day., Elliott divided the class into children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes. Thus, the dominant group, supported by the authorities, will always have the upper hand. A smart blue-eyed girl who had never had problems with multiplication tables started making mistakes. Jane Elliott (ne Jennison; born on 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 on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. "The racists carry on, so I carry on." The lives and legacies of Dr. Jane Elliott and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are inextricably linked. She noticed that student relationships had changed; even if students were friendly outside of the exercise, they treated each other with arrogance or bossiness once the roles were assigned. A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it "evil. Elliott said that blue-eyed people were less intelligent and less clean. They don't replace the diagnosis, advice, or treatment of a professional. In the early morning, dew and fog cover the acres of gently swaying stalks that surround Riceville the way water surrounds an island. As the morning wore on, brown-eyed kids berated their blue-eyed classmates. The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the "Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment" she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. "They can't forget me," she said, "and because of who they are, they can't forgive me. And StanfordUniversity psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo writes in his 1979 textbook, Psychology and Life, that Elliott's "remarkable" experiment tried to show "how easily prejudiced attitudes may be formed and how arbitrary and illogical they can be." Dick DeMarsico/New York World-Telegram & the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/PhotoQuest/Getty Images, Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images, Committee Member - MNF Research Advisory Committee, PhD Scholarship - Uncle Isaac Brown Indigenous Scholarship. Mary and Zeke have three children, all of whom have blue eyes. ", A former teacher, Ruth Setka, 79, said she was perhaps the only teacher who would still talk to Elliott. Elliott was shocked by the results and decided to switch the roles the following day. The results showed a . Cookie Policy Jane Elliot and the Blue-Eyed Children Experiment. Want a quality guarantee? Let's just move on. I interviewed Julie Pasicznyk, who had been working for US West, a giant telecommunications company in Minneapolis. The contents of Exploring Your Mind are for informational and educational purposes only. Malinda Whisenhunt? Part of the problem is that the blue-eyed group is exclusively white, while the brown-eyed group is predominantly non-white, so that eye colour is no longer an analogue or metaphor for race but a . Jane Elliott has done a lot of reflection about the consequences of the minimal group experiment. The experiment, known as Blue Eyes Brown Eyes experiment, is regarded as an eye-opening way for children to learn about racism and discrimination. And they are smarter than blue-eyed people." The brown-eyed children got to sit in the front of the room, to go to lunch first, and to have more time at recess. These initial criticisms didnt stop Elliott. Not everyone appreciated Elliotts exercise. ", Steve Harnack, 62, served as the elementary school principal beginning in 1977. Terms of Use She told the kids that blue-eyed children weren't as good as brown-eyed or green-eyed ones. Why was the Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes Experiment considered unethical in psychology? In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, Jane Elliott devised the controversial and startling, "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise." This, now famous, exercise labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of . You can contribute to that positive change by watching the documentary. Many critics that the children were too young to understand the exercise. That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. The effectiveness of a well-known prejudice-reduction simulation activity, "Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes," was assessed as a tool for changing the attitudes of nonblack teacher education students toward blacks. One of the most famous experiments in education Jane Elliott's "blue eyes, brown eyes" separation of her third grade students to teach them about prejudice was very different from what the public was told, as revealed in this excerpt from the in-depth story about what really happened in that classroom. Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. "You know, sweetheart, you haven't changed one bit. Locals say that drivers don't signal when they turn because everyone knows where everyone else is going. One scholar asserts that it is "Orwellian" and teaches whites "self-contempt." It's the Jane Elliott machine. Decent Essays. Words are the most powerful weapon devised by humankind. She has spoken at more than 350 colleges and universities. Tears formed in the corners of Elliott's eyes. Brown-eyed people, she told the students, are smarter, more civilized and better than blue-eyed people. Throughout the day, Elliott continued to give the children with blue eyes special treatment. Jane Elliott is 84 years old, a tiny woman with white hair, wire-rim glasses and little patience. Jane Elliott's brown eye/blue eye experiment starts at 03:10 of A Class Divided. The brown-eyed children could take off their armbands and give them to the blue-eyed children, who were now taught that they were inferior to the brown-eyed children. Many educators responded by holding mandatory workshops on institutional racism and implicit bias, reforming teaching methods and lesson plans and searching for ways to amplify undersung voices. Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images For many, the experiment went horribly awry. Then tell them that . In a similar vein, Linda Seebach, a conservative columnist for the Rocky Mountain News, wrote in 2004 that Elliott was a "disgrace" and described her exercise as "sadistic," adding, "You would think that any normal person would realize that she had done an evil thing. The American Psychologists Principles and code of conduct state that in cases of deception, experimenters should take into consideration the potential harmful effects to participants. In this article, we'll explain what happened during the experiment and discuss its consequences. She was a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities. They wouldnt be allowed second helpings for lunch. Essay Example, Essay Example on Racism Towards Black People, Essay Sample about Developing a Campaign for School Intimidation, Essay Example on Therapist-Client Relationship Boundaries, Islamic Perspective on Euthanasia, Free Essay Sample. Thats what it feels like when youre discriminated against., -A child participant in the Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes experiment-. And our number two freedom is the freedom to deny that were ignorant., I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our citizens, our black citizens, if you, as a white person, would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand. Three sections were selected to be administered the simulation . [online] Today I Found Out. Professor of Journalism, University of Iowa. To back up my statement Bloom (2005) says Jane Elliott's blue-eyes brown-eyes exercise encouraged children to mistrust authority figures. The basic idea was to separate the class into two halves - those with blue eyes and those with brown. Copyright 20102023, The Conversation Media Group Ltd. "Things are changing, and they're going to change rapidly if we're very, very fortunate," she said. This procedure is sometimes so subtle that no one notices it happening. ", We backed out. To this day, at the age of 86, Jane Elliott continues this work. She was a local girl and the other teachers were intimidated by her success. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others. It has everything to do with power.. On Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, TN. Blue Eye/Brown Eye is an experiment performed by Jane Elliot in 1968 on the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated to demonstrate what prejudice was to her third grade class. She pointed out flaws in a student and associated it with . "It's the same thing over and over again," Cross says. One caller complained that white children would not be able to handle the exercise and would be seriously damaged by the exercise. In Jane Elliott's experiment she made the third graders believe that the blue eyed people were better,than the brown eyed people. (2010). Elliott championed the experiment as an inoculation against racism., [The Conversations Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. "That's what I tried to teach, and that's what drove the other teachers crazy. After the local newspaper published a story on Elliott and the experiment, she was flown to New York to appear on May 31, 1968, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where she extolled the experiments effectiveness in cluing in her 8-year-old white students on what it was like to be Black in America. "On an airplane, it is," Elliott said to appreciative laughter from the studio audience. One of the main ones was the fact that their right to withdraw was taken away from them. ", 2023 Smithsonian Magazine If you white folks want to be treated the way blacks are in this society, stand. The first thing that Jane Elliott did was divide the children into groups: those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. The students who had blue eyes were told that they were better and smarter than their inferior brown-eyed peers. Elliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. Professor Jane Elliott performed a group experiment with her students that they would never forget. She nodded. Having in mind that it would be difficult to explain to third graders about discrimination, she needed to be more practical so that her student could understand how discrimination and prejudice felt. She knew that the children weren't going to buy her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. "Because we might catch something," a brown-eyed boy said. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence. Jane Elliot's 'The Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes Experiment' was unethical in that she created a segregated environment in a third grade classroom. She said she watched and was horrified at what she saw. The secretary said the south side of the building was closed, something about waxing the hallways. Elliott turned into Americas mother of diversity training. A second look at the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment that taught third-graders about racism. The selection was based on the color of the eye for each group. Elliott's friends and family say she's tenacious, and has always had a reformer's zeal. The subjects were 164 students enrolled in eight sections of an introductory elementary education course at a state university. Their response is to create dichotomies of inferiority and superiority. "Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. The exercise is "an inoculation against racism," she says. They gossiped about her in the hallway. One of the ways Hitler decided who went into the gas chamber was eye color, Elliott said in a later speech. "Let me look at you," Elliott said. Below, . The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise received national attention shortly after it ended. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned.

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