A Class Divided

In the powerful documentary, “A class divided,” third grade teacher, Jane Elliott conducts a social experiment, I will not soon forget, with her students about discrimination and racism. In the eye-opening experiment, Elliott firsts leads a conversation with her students about Brotherhood and what it means to them. The students responses were appropriate for children of their age group, many used examples of being kind and treating others how you want to be treated. Elliott then asks the question “Is there anyone in the United States who we do not treat as our brothers?” The children quickly replied, “The black people,” later they discussed other minorities such as Indians and Asians. After Elliott asked the children what they thought of when they saw minorities, one child replied “they are dumb people”. Moments later Elliott suggested that for the next two days that it might be fun to judge people on the color of their eyes. The children agreed and thus the experiment began.

At the start of her experiment, Jane Elliott explained to her children that blue eyed children are better than, smarter than and cleaner than among other things than their fellow classmates that happened to have brown eyes. Over the course of the day, the blue eyed children, were doted on and made to feel superior and special, and naturally they started to believe it themselves. During the experiment there were serval instances when I felt uncomfortable and quite honestly shocked. One such instance was when Elliott asked Raymond (a student who was partially vocal with aggression toward the brown eyes) why he behaved in such a manner toward the brown eyes, he replied, “Yeah, I felt like I was--like a king, like I ruled them brown-eyes, like I was better than them, happy.” While his reply was honest, it was also scary how a child could be “programmed” into a totally different child. The brown eyed kids were not his friends that day, they were not on the same level as he was and it all happened in less than fifteen minutes after someone told them that their brown eyes rendered them inferior. Raymond’s response didn’t surprise me but his actions did. Often time’s racism happens just like that. Children are impressionable and naïve and rightly so. It is the responsibilities of adults and parents that we “program” children to be kind and tolerant.

I enjoyed watching this honest documentary. I plan to share this with my own children someday- sooner rather than later. I think it’s so important to teach our kids right from the very start to be compassionate, and kind to all the despite of race, religion and sexual orientation. I will take a lot of this documentary but perhaps what had the biggest impact that I will carry with me forever is when Elliott said, “After you do this exercise, when the de-briefing starts, when the pain is over and they'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.” (Elliott)

Work Cited

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