“Would you like to try?” Elliott then pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. “It might be interesting to judge people by the color of their eyes,” Elliott teased. That spring morning 50 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. YAAAAAAAAY! And so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. Would you like to find out?”Ī spontaneous cheer arose from the children. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, when Jane Elliott asked her all-White third-grade students “How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl? It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. In essence, she tried to induce a dose of racism into the minds of the third graders. That was part of duping the children into thinking that the experiment was real.Įlliott had constructed a gut-wrenching, true-life nightmare in order to make an indelible point that would stay with her students for the rest of their lives. She encouraged them, based on the children’s newly granted superiority or inferiority. But Elliott did nothing to stop the fights. The experiment became so real that fistfights erupted on the Riceville Elementary School playground. She had told them that half of the class was less intelligent because of their eye color, because of their genetics. She had lied to impressionable children who trusted her. In fact, as I was to learn, the experiment had been inspired by Nazis, as Elliott would be the first to admit. To me, Elliott’s separation of students based on their eye color seemed like a risky experiment that raised all kinds of ethical issues.
In 2004, the American publishing giant, McGraw Hill, created a multipanel poster suitable for classroom display that included Elliott along with the other venerated thinkers and teachers.
Washington, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, and Paulo Freire. In the process, she had turned herself into America’s mother of diversity training.Įlliott was so successful at what she did that she was granted membership in the historic pantheon of the West’s most revered educators: Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Elliott became a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities. She took the experiment to prisons, schools, and military bases. She traveled to conferences and corporate workshops. She tried it on tens of thousands of adults, in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. By 1984, Elliott had left her public school teacher’s job in Riceville, Iowa (population: 806), sixteen miles from the Wisconsin state line, and had taken the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment on the road.
#ELLIOT KIDS ACTIVITY TABLE TV#
An award-winning network TV documentary had aired about her, followed by a starring role at a headline- sparking White House conference on education. Years before the Black Lives Matter movement or the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in the summer of 2020, Elliott, a White woman from out-of-the-way Iowa, had transformed herself into an international authority on all issues of racism and bias. I asked Elliott why she had called me, and without hesitation, she responded, “Because I want you to write a book about me.” Elliott’s moxie piqued my curiosity, and as soon as I got off the phone, I set out to learn more. Starting in the mid-1980s and for the next thirty-five years, Elliott would increase the experiment’s voltage by trying it out on adults in thousands of workshops worldwide. The experiment was Elliott’s way of showing eight- and nine-year-old White children what it was like to be Black in America. The brown-eyed kids would now be considered inferior. The next day, Elliott switched the students’ roles. They wouldn’t be allowed second lunch helpings. They’d have to use paper cups if they wanted to drink from the water fountain.
She instructed the blue-eyed kids that they wouldn’t be permitted to play on the jungle gym or swings. On the first day, she told the blue-eyed children that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed children. The only thing I knew about Elliott was a provocative classroom experiment credited to her.įor a decade, Elliott, a teacher in a small, rural Iowa town, had separated her third-grade students, for two days, into two groups-those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. “Well, this is Jane Elliott and I want to talk to you!” I had never spoken with or met Elliott before and I had no idea why she’d be calling me. Without waiting for a response, the caller sprinted ahead. “Is this Stephen Bloom?” an emphatic voice asked out of the blue one spring morning seventeen years ago.
0 kommentar(er)
