blue eyed brown eyed experiment pbs

• Teaching Resources
• Upcoming Events
• On-demand Events

A Class Divided

• facebook sharing
• email sharing

At a Glance

Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas. Support your PBS station.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, grief and frustration erupted in America's cities. And far away in Iowa, one third grade teacher knew she had to do something.

The shooting of Martin Luther King could not just be talked about and explained away. There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa. I knew that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talk about it. Because we had talked about racism since the first day of school.

This is a fact. Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.

It was a daring experiment in prejudice.

I watched wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders.

Can one teacher, in one day, change the lives of her students forever?

Tonight, a Frontline classic, A Class Divided.

[THEME MUSIC]

August 1984, a high school reunion brings some 50 former students to Riceville, Iowa. Eleven of them, some with their spouses and children, arrive early for a special reunion with their former third grade teacher, Jane Elliott.

This is my husband, Tom.

Tom! Bryan!

How are you?

Oh, I'm just fine.

Roy Wilson.

You darling!

It's been a long time. Haven't been here in--

I'm so glad to see you.

--14 years.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

How are you doing?

A long time since I've seen you.

Yeah, it has been.

Where are your little ones?

They're at home with mom.

And this is your husband, Mr.--

Greg Rollin.

Greg Rollin. Nice to meet you.

Fourteen years earlier, when they were students in her third grade classroom, ABC News filmed a two-day exercise for a documentary, The Eye of the Storm. Now, at their request, they will see that film again and relive the experience of her unique lesson in discrimination.

[CHILDREN SINGING "GOD BLESS AMERICA"]

This is a special week. Does anybody know what it is?

National Brotherhood Week. What's brotherhood?

Be kind to your brothers?

Be kind to your brothers.

Like you would like to be treated.

Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated. Treat everyone as though he was your--

Brother. And is there anyone in this United States that we do not treat as our brothers?

The black people.

The black people. Who else?

Absolutely, the Indians. And when you see-- when many people see a black person, or a yellow person, or a red person, what do they think?

Look at the dumb people.

Yeah, look at the dumb people. What else do they think sometimes? What kinds of things do they say about black people?

They're "negroos," niggers.

In the city, many places in the United States, how are black people treated? How are Indians treated? How are people who are of a different color than we are treated?

Like they aren't part of this world. They don't get anything in this world.

Why is that?

Because they're a different color.

You think you know how it would feel to be judged by the color of your skin?

I don't-- do you think you do? No, I don't think you would know how that felt, unless you had been through it. Would you? It might be interesting to judge people today by the color of their eyes. Would you like to try this?

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Since I'm the teacher, and I have blue eyes, I think maybe the blue-eyed people should be on top the first day.

You mean up here? [INAUDIBLE]

I mean, the blue-eyed people are the better people in this room.

Oh yes they are. Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people.

My dad isn't that stupid.

Is your dad brown-eyed?

One day, you came to school, and you told us that he kicked you.

Do you think a blue-eyed father would kick his son?

My dad would.

My dad's blue-eyed. He's never kicked me. Greg's dad is blue-eyed. He's never kicked him. Rex's dad is blue-eyed. He's never kicked him. This is a fact. Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people. Are you brown-eyed or blue-eyed?

Why are you shaking your head?

I don't know.

Are you sure that you're right? Why? What makes you so sure that you're right?

The blue-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess, while the brown-eyed people have to stay in.

The brown-eyed people do not get to use the drinking fountain. You'll have to use the paper cups. You brown-eyed people are not to play with the blue-eyed people on the playground, because you are not as good as blue-eyed people. Well, the brown-eyed people in this room today are going to wear collars, so that we can tell from a distance what color your eyes are.

On page 127, 127-- is everyone ready? Everyone but Laurie. Ready Laurie?

She's a brown-eyed.

She's a brown-eyed. You'll begin to notice today that we spend a great deal of time waiting for brown-eyed people. The yard-stick's gone. Well, OK. I don't see the yard-stick. Do you?

It's over there.

Hey, Mrs. Elliott, better keep that on your desk, so if the brown-eyed people get out of hand--

Oh, you think if the brown-eyed people get out of hand, that would be the thing to use? Who goes first to lunch?

The blue-eyed people. No brown-eyed people go back for seconds. Blue-eyed people may go back for seconds. Brown-eyed people do not.

What about brown-eyed?

Don't you know?

They're not smart.

Is that the only reason?

We're afraid they'll take too much.

They might take too much.

OK, quiet, please.

And it seemed like, when we were down on the bottom, everything bad was happening to us.

The way they treated you, you felt like you didn't even want to try to do anything.

Seemed like Mrs. Elliott was taking our best friends away from us.

What happened at recess? Were two of you boys fighting?

Russell and John were.

What happened, John?

Russell called me names, and I hit him-- hit him in the gut.

What did he call you?

Brown eyes.

Did you call him brown eyes?

They always call us that. Greg, and all the blue eyes call us that.

They keep calling, brown eyes!

Come here brown eyes!

And they were calling us blue eyes.

I wasn't. Sandy and Donna were.

What's wrong with being called brown eyes?

It means that we're stupider-- well, not that, but--

Oh, that's just the same way as other people calling black people "niggers."

Is that the reason you hit him, John? Did it help? Did it stop him? Did it make you feel better inside? Make you feel better inside? It make you feel better to call him brown eyes? Why do you suppose you call him brown eyes?

Probably because he has brown eyes.

Is that the only reason? You didn't call him brown eyes yesterday, and he had brown eyes yesterday. Didn't he?

Because we just thought of it.

Yeah, ever since you put those blue things on their neck--

We tease them. We kind of tease them.

Oh, is this teasing?

No. Well, he did it once.

Were you doing it for fun, to be funny? Or were you doing it to be mean? I don't know. Don't ask me. Did anyone laugh at you, when you did it?

I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders, in a space of 15 minutes.

Yesterday, I told you that brown-eyed people aren't as good as blue-eyed people. That wasn't true. I lied to you yesterday.

Oh, boy, here we go again.

The truth is that brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people.

Russell, where are your glasses?

I forgot them.

You forgot them. And what color are your eyes?

Susan Ginder has brown eyes. She didn't forget her glasses.

Russell Ring has blue eyes. And what about his glasses?

He forgot them.

He forgot them. Yesterday we were visiting, and Greg said, boy I like to hit my little sister as hard as I can. That's fun. What does that tell you about blue-eyed people?

They're naughty.

They fight a lot.

The brown-eyed people may take off their collars, and each of you may put your collar on a blue-eyed person.

Put down your hands.

The brown-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess. You blue-eyed people are not allowed to be on the playground equipment at any time. You blue-eyed people are not to play with the brown-eyed people. Brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people. They are smarter than blue-eyed people. And if you don't believe it, look at Bryan. Do blue-eyed people know how to sit in a chair? Very sad, very, very sad.

Who can tell me what contraction should be in the first sentence? Go to the board, and write it, John. Come on. Let's do it again. Loosen up, up, up, up. Come on. That's better! Now, do you know how to make a W? OK, write the contraction for "we are." Now, that's beautiful writing. Is that better?

Brown-eyed people learn fast, don't they? Boy, do the brown-eyed people learn fast. Very good!

Greg, what did you do with that cup? Will you please go and get that cup, and put your name on it, and keep it at your desk. Blue-eyed people are wasteful.

OK, want to be timed this morning?

I use Orton-Gillingham phonics. We use the card pack. And the children-- the brown-eyed children-- were in the low class the first day, and it took them 5 and 1/2 minutes to get through the card pack. The second day, it took them 2 and 1/2 minutes. The only thing that had changed was the fact that now, they were superior people.

You went faster than I've ever had anyone go through the card pack.

Why couldn't you get them yesterday?

We were brown-eyed.

We had those collars on. And we--

You think the collars kept you from--

We kept thinking about those collars.

You kept going like this. And my eyes kept rolling around.

Oh, and you couldn't think as well with the collars on.

Four minutes and 18 seconds.

I knew we weren't gonna make it.

Neither did I.

How long did it take you yesterday?

Three minutes.

Three minutes. How long did it take you today?

What happened?

It went down.

Why? What were you thinking of?

I hate today.

How do you do? I hate it, too.

Because I'm blue-eyed.

See, I am, too.

It's not funny. It's not fun. It's not pleasant. This is a filthy, nasty word called discrimination. We're treating people a certain way, because they are different from the rest of us. Is that fair?

Nothing fair about it. We didn't say this was going to be a fair day, did we?

And it isn't. It's a horrid day.

Are you ready? What did you blue-- people who are wearing blue collars now, find out today?

I know what they felt like yesterday.

I did, too. Eww!

How did they feel yesterday?

Like a dog on a leash.

It feels like a chain wherever you go.

--in the prison, like you're chained up in the prison, and you're throwing the key away.

Should the color of some other person's eyes have anything to do with how you treat them?

All right, then should the color of their skin?

Should you judge people by the color of their skin?

You're going to say that today, and this week, and probably all the time you're in this room. You'll say, No, Mrs. Elliott, every time I ask that question. Then, when you see a black man, or an Indian, or someone walking down the street, are you going to say, ha ha! Look at that silly-looking thing.

Does it make any difference whether their skin is black, or white, or yellow, or red? Is that how you decide whether people are good or bad? Is that what makes people good or bad?

Let's take these collars off.

Hey, don't get sticky stuff on it.

Here, Mrs. Elliott. You can have it.

What would you like to do with them?

Throw them away!

Now you know a little bit more than you knew at the beginning of this week.

Do you know a little bit more than you wanted to?

Yes, Mrs. Elliott!

This isn't an easy way to learn this. Is it?

No, Mrs. Elliott!

Oh, will you stop that?

OK, now let's all sit down here together, blue eyes and brown eyes. Does it make any difference what color you are?

Down, girl.

Not up, down.

Oh-ho! You found your friend, huh?

We're friends again!

OK, are you ready to listen up? OK, now are you back.

That feel better?

Does the color of eyes that you have make any difference in the kind of person you are?

Does that feel like being home again, girls?

Oh, will you stop it!

This was the third time Jane Elliott had taught her lesson in discrimination. The first, two years earlier, was in April of 1968. On the day after Martin Luther King was killed, one of my students came into the room and said, they shot a king last night, Mrs. Elliott. Why'd they shoot that king? I knew the night before that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talk about it. Because we had talked about racism since the first day of school. But the shooting of Martin Luther King, who had been one of our heroes of the month in February, could not just be talked about and explained away. There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa.

As I listened to the white male commentators on TV the night before, I was hearing things like, who's going to hold your people together? As they interview black leaders. What are they going to do? Who's going to control your people? As though this was-- these people were subhuman, and someone was going to have to step in there and control them.

They said things like, when we lost our leader, his widow helped to hold us together. Who's going to hold them together? And the attitude was so arrogant, and so condescending, and so ungodly, that I thought if white male adults react this way, what are my third graders going to do? How are they going to react to this thing?

I was ironing the teepee. We studied an Indian unit. We made a teepee every year. The first year, the students would make the teepee out of pieces of sheet. We'd sew it together. And the next year, we'd decorate it with Indian symbols.

I was ironing the previous year's teepee, getting it ready to be decorated the next day. And I thought of what we had done with the Indians. We haven't made much progress in these 200, 300 years. And I thought, this is the time now to teach them, really, what the Sioux Indian prayer that says, oh, Great Spirit, keep me from ever judging a man, until I have walked in his moccasins, really means.

And for the next day, I knew that my children were going to walk in someone else's moccasins for a day. Like it or lump it, they were going to have to walk in someone else's moccasins. I decided at that point that it was time to try the eye color thing, which I had thought about many, many times but had never used.

So the next day, I introduced an eye color exercise in my classroom and split the class according to eye color and immediately created a microcosm of society in a third grade classroom.

Riceville hasn't changed much in the 17 years since then. It's still a small farming community, surrounded by corn fields. Its population is still under 1,000. And it's still all white and all Christian. And though Jane Elliott has continued to teach her lesson in discrimination, there has been little outward local reaction, no objections from school authorities or the parents of the 300-odd students who have, by now, been through it.

OK, let's get in a circle.

The reunion of her former third graders was Jane Elliott's first chance to find out how much of her lessons her students had retained.

All right, now, Raymond, why-- I want to know why you were so eager to discriminate against the rest of these kids? At the end of the day, I thought, the miserable little Nazi.

Really, I just-- I couldn't stand you.

It felt tremendously evil. You could-- all your inhibitions were gone, and no matter if they were my friends or not, any pent-up hostilities or aggressions that these kids had ever caused you, you had a chance to get it all out.

I felt like I was a king, like I ruled them brown eyes, like I was better than them, happy.

And you did it all day.

How did you feel when you were the out group?

Boy, that day, after we went home, woo hoo. Talk about hating somebody. It was there.

You hated me?

Yeah, of what you were putting us through. Nobody likes to be looked down upon. Nobody likes to be hated, teased, or discriminated against. And it just boggles up inside of you. You just get so mad.

Were you just angry, or was there more than that?

I felt demoralized, humiliated.

Is the learning worth the agony?

It made everything a lot different than what it was. You-- we was a lot better family, all togeth-- even in our houses, we was probably. Because it was hard on you. When you have your best friend one day, and then he's your enemy the next, it brings it out real, real quick in you.

Some of the remarks were the kinds of things I would have wished I could have programmed into them. If I had been able to program them, they're the things I would have wanted them to say. Some of the things were just mind-blowing.

You know, you hear these people talking about different people, and how they're, you know, they're different. And they'd like to have them out of the country. I wish they'd go back to Africa, you know, and stuff. Sometimes I just wish I had that collar in my pocket. I could whip it out, and put it on, and say, wear this. And put yourself in their place. I wish they would go what I went-- you know, do what I went through.

We was at a softball game a couple weekends ago. And there was a black yelling, hi, Verla, you know. And we hugged each other and everything. And some people really looked just like, what are you doing with him? You know. And you just get this burning feeling, sensation, and you just want to let it out, and put them through what we went through to find out they're not any different.

I still find myself, sometimes, when I see some people together, and I see how they act, you know, I think, well that's black. And then right in the next second, I don't even finish the thought, I'm saying, well, I've seen whites do it. I've seen other people do it. It's not just the blacks. It's-- everyone acts differently. It's just the different color is what hits you first. And then later-- as I said, I don't even finish that thought before I remember back when I was like that, and I remember, not, you know-- everyone acts the same way. It's just your way of thinking is the difference.

Like when my grandparents or somebody, and they start talking about old times, and they say the Japs, and all this and that, and they start, you know, holding that against them. I think how would you like to have been them? Japanese Americans getting thrown into this camp, just because they happen to be part Japanese. You know, I just-- calm down and think about it. But when they get older, they're set in their ways. And that's not going to change.

When you get older?

I'll be set in my ways, but they're different than their ways. When people--

I was absolutely enthralled. Sandy Dohlman's statements that, when my son comes home with the word nigger and the other things that he hears downtown, I say to him, listen, that isn't the way we judge people. You don't judge people by how they look. You judge them by what's on their inside, not their outside.

I'm glad that she's teaching him not to hate. Because even though he does hear this from the other people, if he goes home, and he thinks, well, Mom and Dad like the black people, I'm going to like them, too. So I don't think he's going to pick nothing bad out of it.

You chose your husband well.

He chose me.

You chose her well.

Little kids will take in-- you know, they'll listen to a lot of other people, too. So they're going to end up, kind of, confused over it.

But if she keeps on telling him, is he going to be the kind of person you kids are, or is he going to be the kind who'll judge people by the color of their skin?

Well, he'll know right-- somewhat right from wrong. He'll know that he won't--

--but he'll have the ideas. He won't be judging them by their color, but he won't know what we know fully, having been through it.

He won't learn--

--the collar thing.

--the prejudice from us.

He won't learn prejudice first-handed.

Yeah. He won't learn to be prejudiced from us. I mean, they won't learn to discriminate between people from us. He might hear it from others, but never from us.

OK, what's it like to be married to somebody like that?

When I was going to marry Sheila, and I knew for my future that I was going into the military. At first, I thought, is she going to be able to handle being with all the different nationalities? And then I read The Storm-- read the book--

A Class Divided.

--The Class Divided before we got married, and before I joined the army. And I said, hey, she's not going to have any problems.

Should every child have the exercise, or should every teacher?

Everybody, not just--

I think every school ought to implement something like this program in their early stages of education.

If Jane Elliott's lesson in discrimination changed the way these young people feel about discrimination and racism, it also had a totally unexpected result.

The second year I did this exercise, I gave little spelling tests, math tests, reading tests, two weeks before the exercise, each day of the exercise, and two weeks later. And almost without exception, the students' scores go up on the day they're on the top, down on the day they're on the bottom, and then maintain a higher level for the rest of the year after they've been through the exercise.

We've sent some of those tests to Stanford University, to the psychology department. And they did a sort of an informal review of them. And they said that what's happening here is kids' academic ability is being changed in a 24-hour period. And that isn't possible, but it's happening. Something very strange is happening to these children, because suddenly, they're finding out how really great they are, and they are responding to what they know now they're able to do. And it has happened consistently with third graders.

The film made of Jane Elliott's third graders in 1970 has been widely used with students and teachers, and by government, business, and labor organizations concerned about human relations. Perhaps the most unusual use of it is here, at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Stormville, New York.

Here, in a sociology course taught by Professor Duane W. Smith of Dutchess Community College, his almost exclusively black and Hispanic classes have been seeing the film for more than 10 years.

What I'd like to do is introduce the subject of prejudice and discrimination through this film called The Eye of the Storm.

Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people. They are cleaner than brown-eyed people. They are more civilized than brown-eyed people.

Sandra and her brown-eyed friends didn't like that day. But Raymond did.

I felt like I was a king, like a--

Do you think the children, by this process, really learned the meaning of discrimination?

Most of the children, before the film started, they had played and lived together in harmony. And the certain actions coming from the teacher, and seeing the teacher as an authoritarian figure and someone to respect, they accepted the views that was being given to them. But I think at the end of the lesson, they could clearly see that prejudices and other forms of discrimination are things that people deal with in their minds, that they're not actually physical barriers that say, yo, you can't cross the street.

The one kid I could really agree with was at recess. He was a brown-eyed kid. He had this inner turmoil against this feeling of being divided or prejudiced against, where he would hit another kid, that he's known for so many years, in the gut. Whether-- he also stated that it didn't help any. So that automatically should be a lesson to every adult in the world. Violence doesn't help any. And you know, this is a film that I hope that my children get to see.

Unlike New York, Iowa is 98% white Anglo-Saxon. Yet even here, minority groups account for more than 20% of the prison population. To make sure its prison system employees are sensitive to the concerns of this large minority, the Iowa Department of Corrections last fall hired Jane Elliott to give her lesson to some of them. The group, which included prison guards and parole officers, was told only that it would be attending a day-long workshop. David Stokesberry--

Most of our training we go to, people give you information, and you learn that way.

When I first came with the sign up and such and got put in the group, I didn't know-- when I started seeing the signs around, brown eyes only and such, I figured they were the better group, because they had a lot of spaces available, and there were none for the blue eyes.

So when I got put in the blue eyes group, and put the collar on, then I knew well, then I was going to be in the deprived group, I guess.

OK, now you can stay in this area.

The workshop was supposed to begin at 9:00. They took the brown eyes in about 9:00, and then left us standing in the hall.

I literally stood, because there weren't enough chairs. And I didn't know whether or not I wanted to try to take a chair down, I didn't know if somebody would come take the chair away from me if I did.

While David Stokesberry and the other blue-eyed people waited, inside the meeting room, Jane Elliott prepared the brown-eyed people for what was going to happen.

Now, this is not something I can do alone. This exercise won't work without your cooperation. Blue-eyed people aren't allowed to smoke. Blue-eyed people aren't allowed to sit in these empty chairs. Do not let a blue-eyed person sit next to you. You know you can't trust them. And besides which, they don't smell good. Everybody knows that about blue-eyed people. You don't know what you can catch from a blue-eyed person.

By 9:20, I felt some antagonism. You know, I'm stuck out here for 20 minutes, standing, waiting.

I still say we ought to see what kind of reaction we'd get by everyone just simply going in. No one wants to do it?

But he seems to have courage and a conviction to do a lot of talking.

[INAUDIBLE]

Oppose it all by singing a song and doing something really loud, you know--

"We Shall Overcome?"

Yeah. Right?

We need to have you keep it down. I don't know how many times I need to give that instruction. But you need to keep it down, so you don't bother the people in the workshop.

I was pretty well ticked off by the time we got taken in there.

Purses and overcoats in the corner here. I need to have your put your purse and your coat in the corner. Purse and coat in the corner. Purses and overcoats in the corner.

It would be to your advantage in the future, people, if you'd get to meetings on time. And it would also be to your advantage if you'd put your gum away.

I'll leave.

Put your gum away.

Do you want to get paid for today?

Well, then stay, but put your gum away.

Well, I don't have a purse, so I don't have a place to put my gum.

I'm sure that you are inventive enough to find a place for the gum. Now, I'd like for you to notice where she put her gum. You have this problem with blue-eyed people. You give them something decent and they just wreck it. You'll also notice that blue-eyed people spend a lot of time playing, look at me, see how cute I am. I can be funny. I can make a joke of this. This is amusing. I'm amused by this. Another thing that is obvious about blue-eyed people is that they're poor listeners.

The first thing you have to do when you're teaching in a segregated situation, when you're working in a segregated situation, is teach the listening skills. The listening skills are, number one, good listeners have quiet hands, feet, and mouths. Everyone needs to write these down.

I'd like for you to look at the man in the back, in the black jacket. The game we're playing is, playing it cool. This is a favorite blue-eyed game, playing it cool. Nobody can bother me, man. I can handle this. I don't have to do this. I'm going to ignore this whole thing.

Number two, good listeners keep their eyes on the person who is speaking. I take it you don't have a pencil. Nor you?

Perhaps you could borrow one from one of your neighbors. Sir, I realize that you feel that you don't need to write it down. But whether or not you write it down, perhaps you could remember it. Good listeners have quiet hands, feet, and mouths. Do you know what that means?

I'm not sure.

I believe that. Do you want me to explain it to you?

That's OK. I'll get a pencil and write this down directly.

Look, blue-eyed people, many of you have pencils. Will one of you please lend him a pencil? Or don't you trust him? Which I can understand. From the last 10 minutes, what have you observed about blue-eyed people?

Blue-eyed people are very stubborn, very self-centered, and wish to control as much of their surrounding as possible, people-wise, I mean. Very inconsiderate people. I don't even know why you have them here in the first place.

We have them here, because we are required to have them here.

We have to, huh?

This is one of the things you have to put up with.

Number three, good listeners listen from the beginning to the very end. OK. Good listeners decide to learn something. And this is the thing you'll have the most difficulty with with blue-eyed people. They decide not to learn something. Some of you have had trouble with blue-eyed people in your home environment. Some of you have had trouble with blue-eyed people in your workplace. Does anybody have an example of that that they'd like to talk about? Anyone?

I have two nephews and one blue-eyed and one's brown-eyed. And the blue-eyed one, he never cleans his room. and he's real lazy. And he doesn't seem to have a lot of energy, the blue-eyed one. But the brown-eyed one, he's real outgoing and he's plays in sports and he's pretty good at it. He just seems like a better kid. So if I have kids, I hope they have brown eyes.

Are you married?

Then, it's a good thing you don't have kids, isn't it.

Well you will know what to do when you choose a mate.

Would you like to read that first listening skill to me?

I haven't got it on my paper yet.

Oh. Why is that? I haven't borrowed the pencil to write it down as yet.

Do you think it's unnecessary?

At this particular point, yes, I do.

I have it in my head, for the most part.

There's a lot of space up there for it, isn't there friend? Do you suppose you could tell me what it is?

It has something to do with keeping your hands and feet still.

Has something to do with that.

I find it interesting that you're amused by our having to stand here and wait for this man to do something that everybody else has already done. I find that highly interesting. Stupid, but interesting. If you are in a situation where someone is constantly, constantly refusing to do what the people in authority ask them to do, what do you know about them? What you do about that person?

Well, think it's a game with them, attention.

Has it gained anything for this gentleman?

Disrespect from, I think, the brown-eyed people.

Has it proven anything to brown-eyed people?

Yes, that this is a typical trait of a blue-eyed person.

Now, read the second one.

I don't have the second one. Can I read it off hers?

You don't have the second one either? You were keeping it in your head. What happened to that plan?

Just the first one I had in my head, not the second one.

The other three aren't important?

Well, they're probably important.

But not important enough for you to write down, right?

Well, they're important. I should've written them down, most probably.

Most probably? Does anybody back there know? You don't have it written down either? I want you to take a look at these two so-called gentlemen. Now, we need to hear the good listening skills from you. I don't want you to think that I'm badgering you boys. But on the other hand--

I don't think that.

On the other hand, you are here to learn something. And if you learn nothing else today, it would be nice if you would learn the listening skills. What do you know now about blue-eyed people that you didn't know before you came in here?

I'm finding I'm going to have to explain things a bit more explicitly to a blue-eyed person than I would to a brown-eyed person.

How many times did I have to repeat the listening skills for Roger? Well, probably Roger is having a rough time today, isn't he. It was about six or seven different times.

You think that's amusing, Roger?

Apparently, somewhat amusing.

As part of the lesson, the Corrections Department employees took a written test.

All right. I need these names and the scores.

I have KR 11.

I'm sorry. I can't hear you.

KR, just initials. 11.

Just KR? Just an initial? No last name?

11. And Churdon or Charles, I'm not sure.

Thank you, sir.

Tell me the name again.

You can't read the name.

No. I can't. Can't make it out.

It's probably mine.

What's your name?

My name is Chambers.

First name?

And what was her score?

E. Riley with a 5.

Will E. Riley please stand?

That's mine.

You know, what you do to the image of blues with your behavior is unfortunate. What you three people do to the image of women with your behavior really makes me angry. The fact that you do this kind of thing and this kind of sloppy work reflects badly on women. I resent that doubly. Yes?

Ma'am, I'd really appreciate it if you'd call us by name when you say, you three people we don't know who you're speaking to. It could be anyone here.

My dear, if you wanted me to call you by name, you'd've put your name on your paper.

It's on my--

It was to be on your paper.

You didn't see my papers, ma'am. I didn't get your name either, because it wasn't on your paper.

That's right.

All right. Now, how can one call you by your name, if you don't care enough about your name to put it on your paper? Don't expect me to worry about it. Don't expect me to worry about it, if you don't put it on your paper. Don't sit here and say my name is important to me, after you have just deliberately not put it on your paper. You're being totally unrealistic.

I don't remember saying my name was important to me. I remember saying, I like to know who you're speaking to when you say, you three.

Then, what should you do?

Ask you to use my name, which I did.

And where should your name have been?

Right where it is.

On your paper?

And on my birth certificate.

Is it on your paper?

Where'd you get a birth certificate?

Same place you got yours.

Out of a slot machine. Same as you did, lady.

I think you're probably right about your own.

Least I know who my parents are, ma'am.

Is she being rude?

Is she being inconsiderate?

Is she being uncooperative?

Is she being insulting?

Yes. Are those the things that we've accused blue-eyed people of being?

Is she proving that we're right?

Does anyone have any comments to make at this point?

Do you feel that there are important blue-eyed people?

There are exceptions to every rule.

And what are those exceptions?

There are a few important blue-eyed people.

You said that.

Do you think that you're one of them?

That's good.

Then, why are you up there then?

I'm blue-eyed. The difference between you and me is I have a brown-eyed husband and brown-eyed offspring. And I've learned how to behave in a brown-eyed society. And when you can act brown enough, then you, too, can be where I am.

I wouldn't want to be where you are.

Are you certain?

Absolutely positive.

You like where you are?

I love where I am.

You like it so much that you don't even identify yourself on your paper?

I don't need to, lady.

Her using the term lady where I'm concerned, what do you think she's trying to do? Is it ignorance or is it deliberately insulting?

I would say it was deliberately insulting.

If it's ignorance, she needs to be taught that to many of us, the word lady is a pejorative. I don't appreciate it. It's a put-down. And it's used to keep women in their place.

I will call you by the correct name.

I will call you by a correct name after this. I won't be kind.

That was kindness on your part?

Then, you are--

I think calling someone a lady is a kindness.

Then, your problem is ignorance.

You can call me lady anytime you like.

I wouldn't do that to you.

No. I know you wouldn't.

I really wouldn't. And that's part of the problem, is a total lack of awareness at what sexism amounts to and how much you contribute to the sexism that keeps you where you are.

I like where I am, lady. I did it again, didn't I?

I'm getting kind of fed up with this whole bunch of garbage.

Brown-eyed peoples are no different than we are. I hate to tell them that. They have these false delusions and such.

Are they being disruptive?

No. You trained them very well. I think that's what they did with the stormtroopers in Germany also. You guys do a real good job sitting out there.

You think that what's happening here today feels like it would have felt in Nazi Germany?

Where do you think you are in that, then?

Where do I think I am?

Who are you, if you're in Nazi Germany? Who are you?

After a break for lunch, Jane Elliott helped the Corrections Department employees analyze what had happened.

Did you learn anything this morning?

I think I learned from the experience of feeling like I was in a glass cage I was powerless. There was a sense of hopelessness. I was angry. I wanted to speak up and yet, at times, I knew if I spoke up, I'd be back in a powerless situation. I'd be attacked. A sense of hopelessness, oppression.

Had you experienced that before?

I realized this morning that there were very few times in my life that I've ever been discriminated against, very few.

And you were this uncomfortable in an hour and a half?

I was amazed at how uncomfortable I was in the first 15 minutes.

Can you empathize at all, then, with blacks, minority group members in this country?

I'm hoping better than before.

We tried to argue with you, you would use just the mere argument as reason for us being lesser than the brown-eyed folks. You know, you couldn't win.

Yeah. Don't we do that every day?

I think some do, yeah. But I would hope that I never get so unreasonable. You know, the statements you were making were groundless and such. And yet, we couldn't argue with them, because if we argued, then we were argumentative and not listening and getting out of our place and all that stuff. And that was frustrating to me. And then, frustrating to me was the other little green tags who were sitting on their hands. My group here was, I didn't think, boisterous enough in our opposition to the whole thing.

Why didn't you people support one another? Why didn't the blue-eyed people-- the blue-eyed people on this side, just sat there. And let's face it, you covered your asses. Right? Why did you just sit there?

Well, I think that's symptomatic of the problem as a whole. We see that in society in general, we see a few people who are making a lot of noise. And the rest of the people sitting back, waiting to see what they're going to do.

OK. As long as I was picking on him, I was leaving you alone, right?

I'd say a lot of people accept that. They let a few people do their fighting for them And they stand back. and if this person's gonna to win, then they'll get on this side. If that person's not gonna win, they'll stay back over here, you know? That's just how it works.

If you were in a real situation where you had to do something about racism, would you stand up and be counted?

What I would do, I don't know. It would depend on--

But you would do something?

I would have to do something. I couldn't go home tonight and face my kids if I didn't.

How did you brown-eyed people feel while this was going on?

Embarrassed.

A sense of relief that I wasn't a blue-eyed person.

Sense of relief that you had the right color eyes? Absolutely.

I really understood, at least I felt that I understood, what it was like to be in the minority.

Why were you angry?

First of all, because it was unreasonable. Secondly, because I felt discriminated against. Thirdly, I think that all of us, everyone in this room, has dealt with discrimination on both sides. You don't have to be black or Jewish or Mexican, or anything else to have felt discrimination in your life.

And as you become an adult, you learn to deal with those feelings within yourself. You learn to handle those. And when you feel yourself in a situation that you can't get out of, which we couldn't, we were a captive audience. And it was not a normal situation, because normally you aren't badgered.

What if you had to spend the rest of your life this way?

I don't know how to answer that.

You don't wake up every morning knowing that you're different. You wake up as a white woman who is going to her job at 8:00 or whatever, where a black person is going to wake up knowing from the minute they get up out of the bed and look in the mirror, they're black. And they have to deal with the problems they've had to deal with ever since they were young and realize that I am different and I have to deal with life differently. Things are different for me.

And I don't think you can really say that you have felt-- maybe you have felt some sort of discrimination. But you haven't felt what it is like for a black woman to go through the daily experiences of arguing and saying, listen to me. My point of view is good. What I have to offer here is good. And no one wants to listen, because white is right. That's the way things are.

I think the necessity for this exercise is a crime. No. I don't want to see it used more widely. I want to see the necessity for it wiped out. And I think if educators were determined, that we could be very instrumental in wiping out the necessity for this exercise.

But I want to see something used. I'd like to see this exercise used with all teachers, all administrators, but certainly not with all students, unless it's done by people who are doing it for the right reasons and in the right way. I think you could damage a child with this exercise very, very easily. And I would never suggest that everybody should use it.

I think you could have training classes for teachers, bring them in, put them through the thing, explain what happened, do the debriefing, and then practice doing this until a group of teachers were able to do it on their own. And teachers are not disabled learners. They could learn to do this, obviously. If I can do it, most anyone can do it. It doesn't take a super teacher to do this exercise.

What began in a third grade classroom has spread, from students to teachers to corrections officers. At the center is still a single teacher, determined to inoculate her students, both young and old, against the virus of bigotry.

After you do this exercise, when the debriefing starts, when the pain is over and you're all back together and you're all one again, you find out how society could be, if we really believed all this stuff that we preach. If we really acted that way, you could feel as good about one another as those kids feel about one another after this exercise is over.

You create instant cousins. I thought maybe that lasted just while they were in my classroom, because of my superior influence. But indeed, these kids still feel that way about one another. They said yesterday-- over and over, the remark was made-- we're kind of like a family now.

They found out how to hurt one another and they found out how it feels to be hurt in that way. And they refuse to hurt one another that way again. And they said, we're kind of like a family now. And indeed we were.

It takes time to build trust, time to find out what's true, time to make up your mind. It takes time to tell the stories that matter. Frontline.

To order Frontline's A Class Divided on DVD or VHS, call PBS Home Video at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

Please note that this video contains dehumanizing language. We have chosen to include it in order to honestly communicate the harmful language of the time; however, dehumanizing language should not be spoken aloud during class.

Supporting Materials

• document Spanish Transcript - A Class Divided

You might also be interested in…

10 questions for the past: the 1963 chicago public schools boycott, the union as it was, radical reconstruction and the birth of civil rights, expanding democracy, why is the coronavirus disproportionately impacting black americans, voting rights in the united states, the struggle over women’s rights, equality for all, responding to the rohingya crisis, bearing witness to japanese american incarceration, the 1963 chicago public school boycott, the devastation of war, inspiration, insights, & ways to get involved.

A Class Divided

Elliott divided her class by eye color -- those with blue eyes and those with brown. On the first day, the blue-eyed children were told they were smarter, nicer, neater, and better than those with brown eyes.

Throughout the day, Elliott praised them and allowed them privileges such as a taking a longer recess and being first in the lunch line. In contrast, the brown-eyed children had to wear collars around their necks and their behavior and performance were criticized and ridiculed by Elliott.

On the second day, the roles were reversed and the blue-eyed children were made to feel inferior while the brown eyes were designated the dominant group. What happened over the course of the unique two-day exercise astonished both students and teacher.

On both days, children who were designated as inferior took on the look and behavior of genuinely inferior students, performing poorly on tests and other work.

Directed by : William Peters

More great documentaries

I think she should explained to these kids is that blacks are called names because of the way the ACT not their color of the skin. ACT like a decent person and blacks will not be talked about.

I have watched this documentary easily over 50 times now. I've watched it multiple times every year I've been in school and every year afterwards. It does not compare to the discrimination that people of colour endure on a daily basis, but it can help put into perspective how much worse peoples lives could be if they had to not only worry about the things that they do on a daily basis but also worry about the colour of their skin and how other people would react all at the same time. People can't choose the colour of their skin just like we can't choose if we need oxygen. We need to not only teach the children, but we must also inform every single person on the planet the power that discrimination has. If we rid prejudice from adults first, then children should naturally be born without it. We have a duty to the people that come after us, to leave them a safe, inclusive, world to live in. 

I really like the film. She deserves an award for doing her job with love and teaching her students to love everyone

I've lived with being different most of my life; due to disabilities. While I think this was a brilliant teaching tool; it pained me to watch it; so I didn't even make it through the 1st 'day'.

This woman was BRILLIANT !

When a person hears the word prejudice, he or she might think it only refers to the racial prejudice often found between those with light skin and those with dark skin. However, prejudice runs much deeper than a person’s color. Prejudice is found between gender, religion, cultural and geographical background, and race. People have discriminated against others based upon these attributes from the beginning of time. Prejudice has become a complex problem in our society today and much of our world’s history is based upon such hatred.

If everyone in this world had respect for one another, we would live in peace and be able to let others believe in what they wish and accept that everyone is different. I believe it all comes down to parents teaching their children right from wrong in our world and raising them in an environment that is centered around acceptance of different ways of life and cultures of people. If we all teach our children and change our ways, sometime in our future we will be closer to accepting that a man’s character is based upon the content of his soul, not his religion, gender, ethnicity, or the color of his skin.

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his/her piont of view- until you climb into there skin and walk around in it". from To Kill A Mockingbird

Translation: it requires great courage to try on the proverbial shoes of others, to try to walk around in there skin. its difficult but important to try to empathize across the barriers of sex, class, race, and religion.

Now you understand why Trump wants to end PBS. Might lead to documentaries like this...

I think she should add a ginger to see if it changes the experiment ...

Well Mattg , so yes the children were encouraged to answer a certain way and yes Jane Elliot (for the sake of this argument) was extreme and unkind to the young minds and hearts that were placed trustingly in her care... i guess the average privilaged person who grows up feeling privilaged is left to organically decide to be racist and privilleged with only the most subtle and loving urges... you obviously have yet to make an unbiased and more thorough analysis of the experiment and the real world.

Listen people, these are children with undeveloped brains, if you can relate so well in your suffering philosophies then that is a personal problem that you are rooted in, quit pretending that you are sooo controlled, that in itself is what is controlling you.... you are a grown adult that is free, quit running around feeding off your own dreamscapes.

It is obvious that you are so caught up in your self that you never have bothered to see that you are free..... you are now a slave to your own philosophies.... you keep yourself "in place."

The experiment spoke to me much more profoundly than a racial divide. It'll it was more about on such a short amount of time.. They crushed the self esteem and character of the child. Imagine on a daily basis year after year of hearing how I wish you were never born etc . Can take many many years of undoing as an adult. To me.. I never saw this as a racial issue.

First of all the contributory nexus for creating this experiment was the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the day previous. This experiment works on adults and children to this day, as Dr. Elliot has now performed this same experiment internationally. It, in my opinion, is how we need to train our law enforcement and persons of authority. Oprah Winfrey performed a similar experiment by having a sort of Invisible Man theme, where a caucasian young man was made to take pigment enhancing medication and wear contacts to see how Blacks were treated. As such, he got to interact with former friends and neighbors who did not know who he was thus clearly exhibiting their racism towards him. He could not take it psychologically. After four days, he needed to quit. His neighbors that were cordial to him called him racial slurs. He never noticed the slurs and disparaging speech they used towards other races before he was another race.

Sadly, until we walk in the shoes of another, we can not truly empathize and understand the individual's journey. Thankfully, we still have Dr. Elliot. She performs this same experiment on those who believe that the Civil Rights struggle should be inclusive of equal rights for sexual equality. She shows how the two struggles are not the same, as Blacks continue to see desparity and inequality daily. As Blacks start each and every struggle, other groups that attach their own separate agendas to the Black Civil Rights struggle, see their individual struggles addressed more easily and more easily than those that originally started the Civil Rights Movement, the African American. Same-sex relationships are more accepted in society. To say or show otherwise, constitutes a "hate crime." To make anti-Semitic statements, even even in jest, is considered a "hate crime," yet shooting Blacks in their backs is not. Following a young man carrying nothing more than a bag of Skittles and an iced tea to hunt and murder that young man is not considered a hate crime, but an act of self defense. Even when the young man was clearly stalked like an animal of prey before his death. Paula Deen admits to having used the "n" word when asked, but was never heard to say it. Her career took a sharp turn, but not a terminal turn. Justin Bieber was clearly heard saying the word repeatedly and yet he was allowed to say an insincere "mea culpa" and move on with his life. Both careers should have ended the same way. It proves Black lives only matter as a slogan, not as a matter of fact. It would be quite lovely if the society that enjoys the culture of the African American could clearly love the people from which the rich culture emanates. For without that culture, America could not claim Jazz as its only musical contribution to the world. Nor would it be able to claim Country (which is merely blues), R&B, Hip-Hop, Rap, Soul. I could go on infinitum and never even scratch the surface. Instead, society chooses to state that the cultural gifts that African Americans, African descendants bring belong to everyone. Yet, those that it truly belongs to are not the ones to advantageously monetize that culture. Making a profit from the culture and the possibility of making money belongs to everyone, but not the culture.

Sadly, Blacks do not learn from history, yet they continually repeat it. Once released from slavery, the promised 40 acres and a mule, never manifested. We continue to seek the favor of those that oppress us by allowing them to imitate, emulate and recreate our culture for their own gain daily, thus creating our own future obselescence. The writing is clearly on the wall. Let's not forget the Macklemore debacle where a white group took all of the honors for hip hop and the cultural descendants of those to whom the culture belongs were, well, honestly, shafted.

This wil continue to happen. When history is finally written in the end, Blacks will not be the creators, but whites will list themselves as the creators of our history. Yet again, we will be cheated of our heritage and legacy. It is like the plantation. The Blacks create the product and the whites get paid from the fruits of our labor. We see it every day when we watch shows like TMZ. The entire staff of young whites copying and emulating every rich cultural expression and making it lame. They even go so far as to laugh at the Black staffers that lack full and proper command of grammar. Again, that lack of grammar (education) as a result of racism manifested in educational systems not meant to embrace, but to defame and/or bastardize the non-Eurocentric vantage point.

Yes, Dr. Elliot continues to shed a light in this dark world. I hope that we are not so blind that we fail to see. Worldwide, her methodologies continue to change lives. I am waiting for the day we learn to use it for all to grow up. By the way, the children in the original April 5, 1968 1968 speak of how it has made them better people to this day. Now that is how education is supposed to be--lifelong and profound.

This shouldn't surprise anyone who has studied the history of US schools. Horace Mann created the American public school system, modeled after that created by Frederick the Great of Prussia. Frederick wanted obedient subjects and he got them.

And the rich who financed Mann wanted the same. And they got it.

More than anything else, school teaches a child two things -- to obey authority and to believe authority.

Both play an enormous role in controlling the masses. And the more education a person gets, the more obedient to and believing in authority.

So in the upper classes which contain the highest level of educated people, everyone believes absolutely in their own superiority and the merit of their position.

School, especially higher education, teaches smart people how to control and abuse the "lesser" people.

In a decent society the smart and strong would help the weak. But we don't live there.

i like what the women says (50 min)

wow...i'm sure japanese or chinese kids woul;d have been much smarter than that, and would have stuck up for each other against the teacher

I wanted to scream in righteous satisfaction of this person's efforts, and in rage at the current system holding back something so sensible... The win-win situation is so easily perceived, yet a--holes choose win-lose domination.

The people on top prevent this all out of conflict of interest, gain, lack of introspection. It is precisely the lack of this understanding and exercise that the people on top not rolling this kind of teaching out are doing exactly that.

can someone be nice enough to answer them for me?

i have a few questions about this experiment

I think several years ago John Stossel (I think that's who it was) did a documentary on how boys are called on more than girls in school. The teachers do it subconsciously.

Very Powerful Doc. !

great documentary!

may god bless the world. this is very powerful and this exercise should still be done in many places around the would.

Isn't it sad that i think that this exercise should still be done in many places around the globe?

When i meet people who seem racist or comes from familys where parents have told you (and media) that black do more bad stuff, i always ask "what if we all got the same skin color, oke? who is the bad guy? how do you sort out now? i think its the fear, easier to point fingers telling, hey its because he is black, hey its because he got a mental illness, people get a shock as soon they tell "he was a normally family guy" then you cant point fingers, damn what do we do then? I got a mental illness, that learned me to think about racism, how awfull it is to hear in news when they point out "a black person (then the crime", they never say "a white person (then the crime" why is that? I begin feeling victim, and its hard to accept and realized how evil some can be and how judgin. Mental ill is dangerous, that you hear from media and movies. Interesting enough, I lost friends i always known, when i got diagnosed and told them about it. Now its so important for me to step up and open peoples eyes here. Before i got the diagnosis, i listen to news and pointed fingers aswell, it learned me so much, im happy about that, ofc also hard that im now aswell so much stigmatized, its horible feeling. But i feel a better person today :)

what about green eyed people??

Similar experiments like this have been carried out with similar results. I remember reading about one, when they had a bunch of people, split the group in two, had one bunch be the prisoners, the other bunch be the guards. I think it was after something like 4 days or so they had to stop the experiement. Something similar happened a fair few years ago, but this was televised. It was on the BBC or channel 4 called The Experiment. That too had to be cancelled after so many days. Just placing someone in an environment is enough to have them act like the environment dictates.

Excellent teacher.

Unfortunately, this is shoddy science that has never been reproduced in any peer-reviewed research. The test itself has no predictive value and is susceptible to manipulation by the test giver which is precisely what we see in this film. Elliot not so subtley helps and hinders the children's responses in accordance with the results she wants to hear. There is a reason why this kind of flashcard nonsense is not the way that tests with the greatest correlations with future academic achievement are done.

Shoddy, feel-good, self-serving nonsense.

I saw this years ago. It is still very powerful to me.

this movie was beautiful and i feel that i grew as a person and learned alot by watching it. Imagine black people were intelligent and motivated enough to enjoy this type of thing, we could all watch it together and really learn alot

I was speechless. I have been living through this discrimination, not by color of eyes but by faith in my country in Indonesia. I'm a teacher and thinking is there anything I could do to help my students growing into a more fair and impartial society. It is really an inspiring experiment.

one of my favorites, for sure, 5 stars...

as excruciating as this is to watch, its a lesson that should be taught to everyone...at a young age. So that we can utterly destroy discrimination, injustices, elitism, inequality...social darwinism...

Reminds me of the book, The Wave, based on a true story of a similar experiment.

soooooooooo excellent!!!! God bless all! WE ARE ALL ONE HEART ONE LOVE!!All beloved ANGELS support all these teachers who educate our precious children to know the equalness of all , and only judge oneself and others on our own actions and behavior towards mankind! oneheart

what was the precursor to jane elliot remarkable lesson?

Thank you so much for that brilliant documentary!

Wonder what the U.S. today would be like if this was done in every school? hmm.

Great documentary!! Shows how easily thoguhts and hatred can be brought into someone's life. As is pointed out, this applies to racism, however it also applies to any other aspect of our lives. Who hasn't know of a child's thoughts altered to fit the adult's explination? Makes you question the true start of your religious affiliations...

This is actually illegal to run a copy of this copyrighted video program online.

We can all be concerned about racism. But what about theft?

I wonder what kind of future political correctness will forge??

Rachel, green eyes went in the "blue" eye group.

It is an extraordinary excellent documentary. I strongly believe that the essence of all kinds of injustices is discrimination. You could see that it is all around the world

If discrimination will be remove from our life , we will see he peace around the world,

personally I think this experiment should be conducted in all elementary schools...

This documentary is so good with best material....

I didn't think the teacher would be able to pull the same stunt with adults, so was surprised at how well she acted with the prison staff so much so that she was getting some of them really pissed off. A great experiment, though as she herself said, hopefully one day we won't need such a test.

fascinating! what a brave and innovative teacher, good doc.

What about the ones with green eyes?

A second look at the blue-eyes , brown-eyes experiment that taught third-graders about racism

Professor of Journalism, University of Iowa

Disclosure statement

Stephen G. Bloom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Iowa provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

View all partners

The killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, was a seismic event , a turning point that compelled many Americans to do something and do it with urgency. 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.

As a journalism professor and author of a book on race that spans more than 50 years, I’ve watched these developments with great concern. We’ve been here before, with unsettling and disturbing results.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 was also an event that spurred educators to action, motivating one teacher to try out a bold experiment touted to reduce racism.

The experiment took the nation by storm.

The day after King’s murder, Jane Elliott , a white third-grade teacher in rural Riceville, Iowa, sought to make her students feel the brutality of racism. Elliott separated her all-white class of students into two groups : blue-eyed children and brown-eyed children.

On the first day, the blue-eyed students were informed that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed students. Elliott instructed the blue-eyed kids not to play on the jungle gym or swings. They wouldn’t be allowed second helpings for lunch. They’d have to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain.

The blue-eyed children were told not to do their homework because, even if they answered all the questions, they’d probably forget to bring the assignment back to class. That’s just the way blue-eyed kids were, Elliott told the students.

On the second day of the experiment, Elliott switched the children’s roles.

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 experiment’s effectiveness in cluing in her 8-year-old white students on what it was like to be Black in America.

A darker side

But Elliott’s experiment had a more sinister impact. To most people, it seemed to suggest that racism could be reduced, even eliminated, by a one- or two-day exercise. It seemed to evince that all white people had to do to learn about racism was restrain themselves from an impulse to engage in made-up cruelty. They needed not acknowledge their privilege or reflect on it. They didn’t need to engage with a single Black person.

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. Stripping away the veneer of the experiment, what was left had nothing to do with race.

It was about cruelty and shaming.

Subsequent research designed to gauge the efficacy of Elliott’s attempt at reducing prejudice showed that many participants were shocked by the experiment, but it did nothing to address or explain the root causes of racism .

The roots of racism – and why it continues unabated in America and other nations – are complicated and gnarled. They are steeped in centuries of economic deprivation and cultural appropriation . The nonstop parade of sickening events such as the murder of George Floyd surely is not going to be abated by a quickie experiment led by a white person for the alleged benefit of other whites – as was the case with the blue-eyed, brown eyed experiment.

Sought-after diversity trainer

Nevertheless, Elliott became as famous as a teacher could become in America.

The 1970s and 1980s were ripe for diversity education in the private and public sectors, and Elliott would try out the experiment at workshops on tens of thousands of participants, not just in the U.S. and Canada, but in Europe, the Middle East and Australia. She traveled to corporations, banks, prisons, schools and military bases.

Thousands of educators across the United States folded the experiment into their curriculums. She was a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities.

She appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” five times.

Unsettling insults

Elliott turned into America’s mother of diversity training .

The anti-racism sessions Elliott led were intense. To get her points across, Elliott hurled insults at workshop participants, particularly those who were white and had blue eyes. For many, the experiment went horribly awry.

In doing the research for my book with scores of peoples who were participants in the experiment, I reached out to Elliott. At first, she cooperated with me. But when she discovered that I was asking pointed questions of scores of her former students, as well as others subjected to the experiment, she made an about-face and said she no longer would cooperate with me. She has since refused to answer any of my inquiries.

Scores of others did participate. I interviewed Julie Pasicznyk, who had been working for US West, a giant telecommunications company in Minneapolis. She was hesitant to enroll in Elliott’s workshop but was told that if she wanted to succeed as a manager, she’d have to attend. Pasicznyk joined 75 other employees for a training session in the company’s suburban Denver headquarters in the late 1980s.

“Right off the bat, she picked me out of the room and called me ‘Barbie,’” Pasicznyk told me. “That’s how it started, and that’s how it went all day long. She had never met me, and she accused me in front of everyone of using my sexuality to get ahead.”

“Barbie” had to have a Ken, so Elliott picked from the audience a tall, handsome man and accused him of doing the same things with his female subordinates, Pasicznyk said. Elliott went after “Ken” and “Barbie” all day long, drilling, accusing, ridiculing them, to make the point that whites make baseless judgments about Blacks all the time, Pasicznyk said.

Elliott championed the experiment as an “inoculation against racism.”

[ The Conversation’s Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. Sign up for Politics Weekly .]

Questioning authority

The mainstream media were complicit in advancing such a simplistic narrative. They embraced the experiment’s reductive message, as well as its promised potential, thereby keeping the implausible rationale of Elliott’s crusade alive and well for decades, however flawed and racist it really was.

Perhaps because the outcome seemed so optimistic and comforting, coverage of Elliott and the experiment’s alleged curative powers cropped up everywhere. Elliott was featured on nearly every national news show in America for decades.

Elliott’s bullying rejoinder to any nonbeliever was to say that however much pain a white person felt after one or two days of made-up discrimination was nothing when compared to what Blacks endure daily.

Back when she introduced the experiment to her Iowa students more than five decades ago, at least one student had the audacity to challenge Elliott’s premise, according to those who were in the classroom at the time.

When she separated the class by eye color and announced that blue-eyed children were superior, Paul Bodensteiner objected at every turn.

“It’s not true!” he challenged.

Undeterred, Elliott tried to appeal to Paul’s self-interest. “You should be happy! You have the right color eyes!”

But Paul, one of eight siblings and the son of a dairy farmer, didn’t buy Elliott’s mollification. “It’s not true and it’s not fair no matter what you say!” he responded.

I often think about Paul Bodensteiner. How can we teach kids to be more like him? Is it even possible today?

• Diversity training
• Anti-racism
• Civil rights era

Research Fellow – Magnetic Refrigeration

Centre Director, Transformative Media Technologies

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

Social Media Producer

Dean (Head of School), Indigenous Knowledges

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Updates: The Fight Against Racial Injustice

America reckons with racial injustice, we are repeating the discrimination experiment every day, says educator jane elliott.

Rachel Martin

Simone Popperl

Avery Keatley

Emma Bowman

Jane Elliott, an educator and anti-racism activist, first conducted her blue eyes/brown eyes exercise in her third-grade classroom in Iowa in 1968. Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images hide caption

Jane Elliott, an educator and anti-racism activist, first conducted her blue eyes/brown eyes exercise in her third-grade classroom in Iowa in 1968.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise ."

As a school teacher in the small town of Riceville, Iowa, Elliott first conducted the anti-racism experiment on her all-white third-grade classroom, the day after the civil rights leader was killed.

She wanted them to understand what discrimination felt like. Elliott split her students into two groups, based on eye color. She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. Brown-eyed people, she told the students, are smarter, more civilized and better than blue-eyed people.

More than 50 years after she first tried that exercise in her classroom, Elliott, now 87, said she sees much more work left to do to change racist attitudes. 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.

"It's happening every day in this country, right now," she said in an interview with Morning Edition . "We are repeating the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise on a daily basis."

When Elliott first conducted the exercise in 1968, brown-eyed students were given special privileges. She said she watched and was horrified at what she saw.

The students started to internalize, and accept, the characteristics they'd been arbitrarily assigned based on the color of their eyes.

Code Switch

Dispatches from the schoolyard.

'I See These Conversations As Protective': Talking With Kids About Race

Elliott started to see her own white privilege, even her own ignorance. At her lunch break that day in the teacher's lounge, she told her colleagues about the exercise. One teacher ended up displaying the same bigotry Elliott had spent the morning trying to fight.

"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. "Not one of them reprimanded her for that or even corrected her. They all either smiled or laughed and nodded."

The interaction only strengthened Elliott's resolve. She decided to continue the exercise with her students after lunch.

"No person of any age [was] going to leave my presence with those attitudes unchallenged," Elliott said.

Two years later, a BBC documentary captured the experiment in Elliott's classroom. The demonstration has since been taught by generations of teachers to millions of kids across the country.

Still, Elliott said the last few years have brought out America's worst racist tendencies. The empathy she works to inspire in students with the experiment, which has been modified over the years, is necessary, she said.

"People of other color groups seem to understand," she said. "Probably because they have been taught how they're treated in this country — that they have to understand us. [White people] on the other hand, don't have to understand them. We have to let people find out how it feels to be on the receiving end of that which we dish out so readily."

But the protests happening now have given her hope.

"Things are changing, and they're going to change rapidly if we're very, very fortunate," she said. "If this ugly change, if this negative change can happen this quickly, why can't positive change happen that quickly? I think it can."

• Martin Luther King Jr
• racial justice

The best free cultural &

educational media on the web

• Online Courses
• Certificates
• Degrees & Mini-Degrees
• Audio Books

After MLK’s Assassination, a Schoolteacher Conducted a Famous Experiment–“Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes”–to Teach Kids About Discrimination

in Current Affairs , History | June 12th, 2020 6 Comments

Get­ting his­to­ry across to young stu­dents is chal­leng­ing enough, but what should a teacher do when actu­al his­to­ry-mak­ing events hap­pen on their watch? They have to be acknowl­edged, but to what extent do they have to be explained, even “taught”? Of the teach­ers who have turned his­to­ry-in-the-mak­ing into a les­son, per­haps the most famous is Jane Elliott of Riceville, Iowa. On April 5, 1968, the day after Mar­tin Luther King Jr.‘s assas­si­na­tion, she divid­ed her class­room of third-graders along col­or lines: blue-eyed and brown-eyed. On the first day she grant­ed the brown-eyed stu­dents such spe­cial priv­i­leges as desks in the front rows, sec­ond help­ings at lunch, and five extra min­utes of recess. The next day she reversed the sit­u­a­tion, and the blue-eyed kids had the perks.

What brought seri­ous atten­tion to Elliot­t’s small-town class­room exper­i­ment was the result­ing arti­cle in the  Riceville Recorder , which report­ed some of what her stu­dents wrote in their assign­ments respond­ing to the expe­ri­ence. The Asso­ci­at­ed Press picked up the arti­cle and soon Elliott received a call from The Tonight Show  invit­ing her to come chat with John­ny Car­son about her “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exer­cise on nation­al tele­vi­sion.

“I did­n’t know how this exer­cise would work,” Elliott tells Jim­my Fal­lon on the clip from the cur­rent Tonight Show at the top of the post . “If I had known how it would work, I prob­a­bly would­n’t have done it. If I had known that, after I did that exer­cise, I lost all my friends, no teacher would speak to me where they could be seen speak­ing to me, because it was­n’t good pol­i­tics to be seen talk­ing to the town’s only ‘N‑word lover.’ ”

Elliot­t’s fam­i­ly also expe­ri­enced severe blow­back from her sud­den fame, but it did­n’t stop her from fur­ther­ing the clear­ly res­o­nant idea she had devised. She con­tin­ued to per­form Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes in class: the third time, it was filmed and became the 1970 tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary The Eye of the Storm . (Some of the lan­guage used by her stu­dents sure­ly would­n’t make it to the air today.) Fif­teen years lat­er, PBS’ Front­line reunit­ed Elliot­t’s third-grade class of 1970 for its Emmy Award-win­ning episode A Class Divid­ed , and a decade there­after Ger­man film­mak­er Bertram Ver­haag would again film Elliott per­form­ing her sig­na­ture exer­cise for the doc­u­men­tary Blue Eyed . In a vari­ety of set­tings across Amer­i­ca and the world, Elliott con­tin­ues, in her late eight­ies, to make her point. It isn’t always well received, as she reveals in this Front­line fol­low-up inter­view , and at times has even drawn threats of vio­lence. “I can be scared, but I won’t be scared to death,” she says. “Or, at my age, of death.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s Hand­writ­ten Syl­labus & Final Exam for the Phi­los­o­phy Course He Taught at More­house Col­lege (1962)

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Niet­zsche, Hegel & Kant to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

How a Virus Spreads, and How to Avoid It: A For­mer NASA Engi­neer Demon­strates with a Black­light in a Class­room

Based in Seoul,  Col­in Mar­shall  writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book  The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les  and the video series  The City in Cin­e­ma . Fol­low him on Twit­ter at  @colinmarshall , on  Face­book , or on  Insta­gram .

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (6) |

Related posts:

Comments (6), 6 comments so far.

I have seen this going around the Inter­net and I am con­cerned by how uncrit­i­cal­ly peo­ple have accept­ed this form of learn­ing. It is impor­tant for chil­dren to learn about the evils of prej­u­dice and racism. But I do not think edu­ca­tion should ever require that stu­dents be humil­i­at­ed, no mat­ter the guise and no mat­ter the cause. Much as the teacher is well-inten­tioned, this is an exer­cise in teacher-man­dat­ed bul­ly­ing. I have seen an exam­ple of this method used more recent­ly on col­lege kids, in which the pro­fes­sor enlists the stu­dents them­selves to jeer at blue-eyed stu­dents (in this case I do not think the exer­cise was reversed). When one blue-eyed stu­dent wants to leave, the pro­fes­sor says she may only do so only on the con­di­tion that she per­son­al­ly apol­o­gize to every brown-eyed stu­dent in the room. This is degrad­ing. The medievals believed in the purifi­ca­tion of the soul through the cleans­ing flames of fire. I’d like to think that in the 21st cen­tu­ry we do not still sub­scribe to the notion that our guilt may only be expur­gat­ed through the suf­fer­ing of the guilty.

This is a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, but it also has con­crete con­se­quences. I can­not help but think that one of the myr­i­ad lessons learned in this class­room envi­ron­ment is that there are times and places when it is okay for the teacher or the oth­er stu­dents to treat each oth­er unfair­ly, as long as it is prop­er­ly “jus­ti­fied.” Chil­dren learn that ratio­nal­iza­tion is the means by which any behav­ior is sanc­tioned. It also instills in stu­dents pre­cise­ly the oppo­site mes­sage that we want to tele­graph: that the way they look is of absolute­ly para­mount impor­tance every­where and always, even in the class­room. Real­ists might say that this is true of real life — but should it be encour­aged? Sought after? Insti­tut­ed by teacher? The class­room should be a place where a child’s appear­ance — and par­tic­u­lar­ly judg­ments about whether that appear­ance is good or bad — is nev­er part of the cur­ricu­lum for any rea­son.

Bring­ing peo­ple togeth­er, encour­ag­ing empa­thy, reduc­ing alien­ation, pro­mot­ing equal­i­ty, destroy­ing prej­u­dice is the goal. This is not accom­plished by mim­ic­k­ing the out­side world and divid­ing stu­dents up into sep­a­rate teacher-man­dat­ed castes. I would not be sur­prised if after this exper­i­ment the pri­vate rela­tion­ships between the blue-eyed and brown-eyed stu­dents remained less mixed than ever.

Inter­est­ing exper­i­ment; how­ev­er, when real racism can’t be found, invent it! It’s why “micro-aggres­sion” even exists. Pub­lic schools should­n’t be lab­o­ra­to­ries for social engi­neer­ing, that’s what col­lege is for. Schools today will teach, or indoc­tri­nate, young stu­dents on the woke-beliefs of-the-day, but they won’t teach those same kids how to bal­ance their check­book, or write neat cur­sive, etc. Use­ful life-skills. It’s uncom­fort­able, but a fact. If any­thing, wait till they hit puber­ty, so their now-abstract minds can decide for them­selves about the said-issue dis­cussed in the class­room.

While I con­sid­er myself a con­ser­v­a­tive in most con­texts such as lim­it­ed role for gov­ern­ment, fis­cal restraint, per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty, and faith in God, I found myself won­der­ing why this is not used in every class­room in the U.S. The left­ists that have become so much a part of edu­ca­tion claim that con­ser­v­a­tives are the ones per­pet­u­at­ing racism, but the real­i­ty is that the par­ty of the left, Demo­c­rat Par­ty, has been respon­si­ble for seg­re­ga­tion, dis­crim­i­na­tion, Jim Crow,and the wel­fare state that has kept the black com­mu­ni­ty down for over a cen­tu­ry. Per­haps that is exact­ly why this is not a stan­dard part of the cur­ricu­lum in our schools. That is both sad and mad­den­ing. I was serv­ing in Viet­nam when these events took place. Nobody thought any­thing about race in the mil­i­tary at that time. We were all there to do the same jobs. The exper­i­ment in this video — most impor­tant­ly — pro­vides the per­fect body of evi­dence for why the black com­mu­ni­ty feels the way they do. Telling some­one they are less human, less intel­li­gent, or just dif­fer­ent and infe­ri­or quick­ly pro­duces a belief that those things are true. This is what wel­fare and gov­ern­ment depen­den­cy does to the human spir­it. Poli­cies that encour­age per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty and oppor­tu­ni­ty for every­one are the means of lift­ing all peo­ple to be the best that they can be. There is no way for any per­son to know what dis­crim­i­na­tion does to you unless it is expe­ri­enced and this teacher hit the nail on the head when it comes to the per­fect means to do that while kids are young and impres­sion­able. Kudos to the teacher.

You have no idea how wrong you are. Destroy­ing prej­u­dice can tru­ly only be done by hav­ing the offend­er expe­ri­ence what it is like to be dis­crim­i­nat­ed against. In order to do that, the seeds must be plant­ed through an exper­i­ment such as this one when their minds are impres­sion­able and they have not been hard­ened by expo­sure to a soci­ety that has insti­tu­tion­al­ized a mind­set. Our coun­try has come a long way toward the goal of equal­i­ty and there is like­ly no way to elim­i­nate indi­vid­ual cas­es of dis­crim­i­na­tion or racism, but it would have tak­en a lot less time to achieve has all of my gen­er­a­tion had been exposed to this exer­cise. Sit­ting around in a cir­cle singing Kum-by-yah has lit­tle last­ing effect. There has to be a per­son­al impact to make it sink in.

I grew up in south­west­ern Michi­gan dur­ing the ‘70s. My fifth grade teacher did this exer­cise with our class. While we weren’t allowed to scape­goat our fel­low class­mates, the expe­ri­ence of being part of the non-priv­i­leged group had a pro­found impact on how I learned to treat oth­ers.

We also had a junior high teacher who had us do the bunker exer­cise where there’s sup­plies for few­er peo­ple than were there, and as a group, we had to decide who deserved to Live and defend our choic­es.

In my expe­ri­ence, this result­ed in me look­ing past some­one unlike me as “oth­er” and to find where we were more alike.

I don’t get why peo­ple hate blue eyes, we are humans too… I’m cry­ing by the fact that they think we are evil. Not all blue eyes should be con­sid­ered evil. Now i feel unsafe about this world how all these peo­ple are going like “Can­cel blue eyes!! We hate blue eyes!” please just please we don’t want this to hap­pen… I don’t. X’O

Add a comment

Leave a reply.

Name (required)

Email (required)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Click here to cancel reply.

• 1,700 Free Online Courses
• 200 Online Certificate Programs
• 100+ Online Degree & Mini-Degree Programs
• 1,150 Free Movies
• 1,000 Free Audio Books
• 150+ Best Podcasts
• 800 Free eBooks
• 200 Free Textbooks
• 300 Free Language Lessons
• 150 Free Business Courses
• Free K-12 Education
• Get Our Daily Email

Free Courses

• Art & Art History
• Classics/Ancient World
• Computer Science
• Data Science
• Engineering
• Environment
• Political Science
• Writing & Journalism
• All 1500 Free Courses
• 1000+ MOOCs & Certificate Courses

Receive our Daily Email

Free updates, get our daily email.

Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.

FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Free Movies

• 1150 Free Movies Online
• Free Film Noir
• Silent Films
• Documentaries
• Martial Arts/Kung Fu
• Free Hitchcock Films
• Free Charlie Chaplin
• Free John Wayne Movies
• Free Tarkovsky Films
• Free Dziga Vertov
• Free Oscar Winners
• Free Language Lessons
• All Languages

Free eBooks

• 700 Free eBooks
• Free Philosophy eBooks
• The Harvard Classics
• Philip K. Dick Stories
• Neil Gaiman Stories
• David Foster Wallace Stories & Essays
• Hemingway Stories
• Great Gatsby & Other Fitzgerald Novels
• HP Lovecraft
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Free Alice Munro Stories
• Jennifer Egan Stories
• George Saunders Stories
• Hunter S. Thompson Essays
• Joan Didion Essays
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez Stories
• David Sedaris Stories
• Stephen King
• Golden Age Comics
• Free Books by UC Press
• Life Changing Books

Free Audio Books

• 700 Free Audio Books
• Free Audio Books: Fiction
• Free Audio Books: Poetry
• Free Audio Books: Non-Fiction

Free Textbooks

• Free Physics Textbooks
• Free Computer Science Textbooks
• Free Math Textbooks

K-12 Resources

• Free Video Lessons
• Web Resources by Subject
• Quality YouTube Channels
• Teacher Resources
• All Free Kids Resources

Free Art & Images

• All Art Images & Books
• The Rijksmuseum
• Smithsonian
• The Guggenheim
• The National Gallery
• The Whitney
• LA County Museum
• Stanford University
• British Library
• Google Art Project
• French Revolution
• Getty Images
• Guggenheim Art Books
• Met Art Books
• Getty Art Books
• New York Public Library Maps
• Museum of New Zealand
• Smarthistory
• Coloring Books
• All Bach Organ Works
• All of Bach
• 80,000 Classical Music Scores
• Free Classical Music
• Live Classical Music
• 9,000 Grateful Dead Concerts
• Alan Lomax Blues & Folk Archive

Writing Tips

• William Zinsser
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Toni Morrison
• Margaret Atwood
• David Ogilvy
• Billy Wilder
• All posts by date

Personal Finance

• Open Personal Finance
• Amazon Kindle
• Architecture
• Artificial Intelligence
• Comics/Cartoons
• Current Affairs
• English Language
• Entrepreneurship
• Food & Drink
• Graduation Speech
• How to Learn for Free
• Internet Archive
• Language Lessons
• Most Popular
• Neuroscience
• Photography
• Pretty Much Pop
• Productivity
• UC Berkeley
• Uncategorized
• Video - Arts & Culture
• Video - Politics/Society
• Video - Science
• Video Games

Great Lectures

• Michel Foucault
• Sun Ra at UC Berkeley
• Richard Feynman
• Joseph Campbell
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Leonard Bernstein
• Richard Dawkins
• Buckminster Fuller
• Walter Kaufmann on Existentialism
• Jacques Lacan
• Roland Barthes
• Nobel Lectures by Writers
• Bertrand Russell
• Oxford Philosophy Lectures

Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.

Great Recordings

• T.S. Eliot Reads Waste Land
• Sylvia Plath - Ariel
• Joyce Reads Ulysses
• Joyce - Finnegans Wake
• Patti Smith Reads Virginia Woolf
• Albert Einstein
• Charles Bukowski
• Bill Murray
• Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare
• William Faulkner
• Flannery O'Connor
• Tolkien - The Hobbit
• Allen Ginsberg - Howl
• Dylan Thomas
• Anne Sexton
• John Cheever
• David Foster Wallace

Book Lists By

• Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Ernest Hemingway
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Allen Ginsberg
• Patti Smith
• Henry Miller
• Christopher Hitchens
• Joseph Brodsky
• Donald Barthelme
• David Bowie
• Samuel Beckett
• Art Garfunkel
• Marilyn Monroe
• Picks by Female Creatives
• Zadie Smith & Gary Shteyngart
• Lynda Barry

Favorite Movies

• Kurosawa's 100
• David Lynch
• Werner Herzog
• Woody Allen
• Wes Anderson
• Luis Buñuel
• Roger Ebert
• Susan Sontag
• Scorsese Foreign Films
• Philosophy Films
• February 2024
• January 2024
• December 2023
• November 2023
• October 2023
• September 2023
• August 2023
• February 2023
• January 2023
• December 2022
• November 2022
• October 2022
• September 2022
• August 2022
• February 2022
• January 2022
• December 2021
• November 2021
• October 2021
• September 2021
• August 2021
• February 2021
• January 2021
• December 2020
• November 2020
• October 2020
• September 2020
• August 2020
• February 2020
• January 2020
• December 2019
• November 2019
• October 2019
• September 2019
• August 2019
• February 2019
• January 2019
• December 2018
• November 2018
• October 2018
• September 2018
• August 2018
• February 2018
• January 2018
• December 2017
• November 2017
• October 2017
• September 2017
• August 2017
• February 2017
• January 2017
• December 2016
• November 2016
• October 2016
• September 2016
• August 2016
• February 2016
• January 2016
• December 2015
• November 2015
• October 2015
• September 2015
• August 2015
• February 2015
• January 2015
• December 2014
• November 2014
• October 2014
• September 2014
• August 2014
• February 2014
• January 2014
• December 2013
• November 2013
• October 2013
• September 2013
• August 2013
• February 2013
• January 2013
• December 2012
• November 2012
• October 2012
• September 2012
• August 2012
• February 2012
• January 2012
• December 2011
• November 2011
• October 2011
• September 2011
• August 2011
• February 2011
• January 2011
• December 2010
• November 2010
• October 2010
• September 2010
• August 2010
• February 2010
• January 2010
• December 2009
• November 2009
• October 2009
• September 2009
• August 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006

©2006-2024 Open Culture, LLC. All rights reserved.

• Advertise with Us
• Copyright Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use

The Whole Staircase: Films Celebrating 400 Years of African American History & Culture

• The Whole Staircase - Home
• America's Blues
• The Birth of a Nation
• The Black Atlantic, 1500 - 1800
• The Blind Side
• By The People: The Election of Barack Obama
• A Class Divided
• Faubourg Tremé
• For Colored Girls
• Hidden Figures
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• MLK's "I Have A Dream" Speech
• A Raisin in the Sun
• Tell Them We Are Rising
• To Sir, With Love
• Voting Matters
• Campus Locations, Maps, and Contacts

A Class Divided   (1985)

A Class Divided is about teacher Jane Elliot's lesson on discrimination and the effects of that lesson. “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.” - Frontline

Julie Blanco-Davila received her Master's degree from Texas Tech University and joined the SJR State faculty in 2006. 

Screening Dates and Locations

Screening with Professor Julie Blanco-Davila

June 3, 2019, at 9:00 a.m.

St. Augustine Campus, Room C-116

If you need an interpreter, please contact Dr. Will by May 30, 2019

Film Screening  (no presenter)

Date: November 21, 2019

Location: Palatka Campus Library

Time: 5:30 p.m. 

Members of the  Race Issues Study Circle  will be in attendance. 

All  are we lcome to this free event!

Film Information: A Class Divided

"After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., an elementary school teacher in a small Iowa town decided to introduce ideas about racism and discrimination to her all-white class. This classic Frontline episode recounts Jane Elliott’s bold experiment and its provocative approach—awarding special privileges to her blue-eyed students while discriminating against those whose eyes were brown. The program tracks down Mrs. Elliott’s former third-graders to learn what effect those early lessons about ignorance and injustice had on their lives." - distributor's description

Run time: 54 minutes

Licensed through Films on Demand.

Resources for Further Exploration - A Class Divided

Online Resources

An introduction to A Class Divided  

An Unfinished Crusade: An Interview with Jane Elliott

Discrimination: Experimental Evidence from Psychology and Economics by Lisa R. Anderson, Roland G. Fryer, Jr. and Charles A. Holt, prepared for the Handbook on Economics of Discrimination

Books and eBooks at the SJR State Library Books may be checked out by community patrons as well as SJR State students faculty and staff. If a title is located at another campus, the book may be sent to another campus upon request.

Please note: eBooks are only available to current SJR State students, faculty, and staff with a MySJRstate login.

Celebration • Education • Reflection

H.R.1242/Public Law 115-102 , the 400 Years of African American History Commission Act, establishes 2019 as a year of "commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Africans in the English colonies, at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619."  The commemoration is intended “to recognize and highlight the resilience and contributions of African-Americans since 1619; to acknowledge the impact that slavery and laws that enforced racial discrimination had on the United States; and to educate the public about the arrival of Africans in the United States; and the contributions of African-Americans to the United States.” In recognition of this commemoration and with the Act serving as a guide, the SJR State Library has organized a year-long series of events that will provide educational experiences and resources to students and the community that celebrate the history and culture of African Americans.

Site created and maintained by Dr. Christina Will . Pages will be added and maintained throughout 2019. Maintenance will cease at the end of 2019 but this site will remain accessible.

• << Previous: By The People: The Election of Barack Obama
• Next: Faubourg Tremé >>
• Last Updated: May 26, 2021 10:06 AM
• URL: https://learningresources.sjrstate.edu/TheWholeStaircase

Blue eyes / Brown Eyes: A Class Divided Documentary Video

This has repercussions on so many of teaching environments today. For example, if you’re teaching a group of students and your consistently giving a student 52% on their test results…. what bigger impact is that having on them? If you’re an educator, that’s an important question you need to ask yourself.

I don’t think Jane Elliott’s documentary about discrimination would be allowed to take place today, but I feel as a community such a documentary is so important to help us humanize what some of the data on educational techniques mean, and it shines a light (a very bright light) on the consequences of making your students feel inferior. The lesson: treat your students as inferior and they will act inferior .

You can see the film here .

Supercharge Your eLearning Business

• Welcome teachers! Log in or Register Now for a free ProTeacher account!
• Teaching Topics Archive

Blue Eye/Brown Eye experiment - activities for classroom?

• Thread starter tammynj
• Start date Mar 7, 2010

Senior Member

• Mar 7, 2010

Just wondering if anyone has used or discussed The Blue Eyed/Brown Eyed Project in their classroom. We're going to be viewing the video clip from PBS and they do include ideas and discussion questions, but I was hoping for advice and/or ideas from teachers who have used it before. I teach 6th grade.  

Is this what you mean? I couldn't find the same thing at PBS, but am wondering if this is where you separate the students by eye color and then treat them differently? I do that every year. It has a powerful impact on the students. Since I am brown eyed, I send the blue eyed students to a further away restroom when needed (and time them to boot). I put the brown eyed students up front in the classroom and don't mind if they collaborate on work. I say things like, "I don't expect you in the back will be able to figure this out, so..." At the end of the day, I let them draw what they are feeling on paper. Then I ask them to put those feelings into words. The results are some awesome, powerful poems and scribble drawings to frame them (I hang them in the hall). These poems are always favorites with the students because they identify with the feelings being expressed.  

I remember watching the video in college (undergrad) and being told we would easily be fired if we tried it today (that was 12 years ago). So no, I don't do it. I understand how powerful a message it can send, though.  

• Mar 8, 2010

No, I'm not going to do it. We are watching the video with our kids. We watched the first day of the experiment today and my kids were enthralled. (A few said they wanted to try it!) They are eager to see what happens the next day of the experiment.  

• Mar 13, 2010

Ditto...Chdmom Exactly! Watched it in College, the lady came to talk to us....and we were told by our professors if we tried it we would be fired! This was over a decade ago. .  

Get the Reddit app

tl;dw /r/Documentaries is reddit's main subreddit for documentaries. Please read the our community rules.

Brown Eyes and Blue Eyes (1968) - The amazing experiment conducted by Jane Elliot with her students about racism and how it is taught rather than being inherent. An amazing look into how entitlement is fostered. [00:14:36]