For my multicultural experience, I decided to watch the FRONTLINE documentary A Class Divided (1985).

Like my last multicultural experience, I never heard of this documentary before reading the lessons multicultural recommendations.  After watching the trailer, I was extremely interested because of the quote from teacher Jane Elliott, “I watched wonderful, thoughtful children, turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders” (A Class Divided, 1985).  In addition, I picked this documentary due to the subjects of discrimination and racism to better understand them and to benefit my own self, due to my innate bias scoring from earlier in the semester.

To provide a very brief summary of the FRONTLINE documentary, it highlights a class reunion in 1984 comprised of eleven of Jane Elliott’s former students.  Jane Elliott was their 3rd-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa, and her exercise “blue/eyes, brown/eyes” forever changed their way of looking at people for who they are on the inside, not the outside.  Her exercise was influenced by a Sioux Indian prayer that says, “oh great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins” (A Class Divided, 1985). Elliott, who always discussed racism and discrimination with her young students knows something extra must be done about the subjects in wake of the Martin Luther King assassination.  Even though she had always discussed race issues in her almost all white classroom, (Riceville, Iowa had a population of about 98% white), however, her messages fell flat.  Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, a student asking Mrs. Elliott, “why they killed a King last night”, along with the media coverage of the assassination motivated her to put an exercise into action.  She explains in the documentary by saying, “It was time to deal with this (racism/discrimination) 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 in the month of February could not just be talked about and explained away” (A Class Divided, 1985).  In addition, “there was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa, and 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 interviewed black leaders, as if they were subhuman and someone was going to have to step in there and control them” (A Class Divided, 1985).  As stated above, her exercise was called, “blue eyes/brown eyes”, and its main objective was to create an unfair and divided classroom based on eye color, where the blue-eyed students would be superior for a day, and then the roles would be reversed the following day or so.  To easily distinguish the groups from each other, she had a different color eye group wear a collar.  After the groups were created, she would then train the groups.  Her exercise would then be featured in “The Eye of the Storm”, which aired in 1970, and was used in adult training sessions across all industries.  Featured in the documentary was the exercise in the Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Stormville, New York. I’ll explain the documentary in more detail as I discuss what I learned from it throughout the rest of the post.

Jane Elliott, from the documentary, A Class Divided, retrieved from FRONTLINE article, “An Unfinished Crusade: An Interview with Jane Elliott”

To explain the exercise and reactions in more detail, Jane Elliott would divide the class into groups based on eye color, and name an eye color, typically blue first, as the superior group.  She would then prime the students with messaging of why this group is better. For example, she would explain to the class how and why the blue-eyed individuals are smarter, more disciplined, and better behaved.  In addition, she allowed them to have privileges such as longer recess and second portions at lunchtime, all while the brown-eyed students were unable to play, sit, or associate with the blue-eyes.  In an extremely short time, the blue-eyed students would begin performing better in the classroom, while also treating the non-blue-eyed students differently.  In addition, the non-blue-eyed students, who the day before performed well, began performing poorly.  Once the roles were reversed, the brown-eyed students began performing exceptionally well, and the non-brown-eyed students performed poorly.  This response led to Elliott’s quote, “, “I watched wonderful, thoughtful children, turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders in 15 minutes” (A Class Divided, 1985).

She had assessments that she would track and year after year the results would be the same.  The students were tested on spelling, reading, and math, and as Elliott explains in the documentary, “Scores go up when the students are on top, down when they are on the bottom and then maintain a higher level for the rest of the year after the exercise.”  She then sent these results out to Stanford University for further study, which their analysis stated, “Children’s academic ability is being changed for the better in a 24 hour period that it isn’t possible, but it is happening, something very strange is happening to the children because suddenly they are finding out how really great they are and they are responding to what they know now they’re able to do, results consistent among 3rd graders” (A Class Divided, 1985).  In the end, the children learned that you cannot be prejudice against someone just for being different and that the actions of discrimination hurt individuals and create hostility.

Photo of Jane Elliott’s 3rd-grade class, retrieved from the documentary, “A Class Divided”

Also, this same exercise was put into action at the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York, which “minority groups account for more than 20%to help staff with their minority population” (A Class Divided, 1985). Elliott again segregated groups, this time with adults, by their eye color.  She gave brown-eyed individuals the advantages, throughout the exercise (chairs, paper, pencils, etc.), while forcing the blue-eyed individuals to wait outside while the meeting started, and often had the staff tell them to be quiet as they were interrupting the meeting.  Finally, Elliott allowed the blue-eyed individuals into the room, after training the brown-eyed individuals of all the negative characteristics blue-eyed people have.  She would consistently berate the blue-eyed people for chewing gum, being unprepared, being late, (even though she didn’t let them into the meeting until later).  This created hostility among the two groups, with one adult, in particular, getting into an argument with Elliott.  After the 1 hour and 30-minute session and a lunch break, everyone returned to discuss the exercise.  Many blue-eyed people agreed that they were frustrated, and felt hopeless, because “even when they tried to argue, the fact they were even arguing was used against them” (A Class Divide, 1985). In my opinion, the overall message showed the adults the dangers of both prejudice and abuse of power.

Key Takeaways:

The main takeaways from the documentary are how dangerous discrimination is and how it can be passed down generationally.  Also, I took away how impressionable children are when they are around a person they trust or look at as an authoritative figure.  During, the reunion parents were interviewed, and they discussed the impact of the exercise and how they carried that with them the rest of their lives and have passed the learning down to their children.  Just because their children are exposed to a world that treats non-white people as lesser beings, doesn’t mean that the children will continue the dysfunction.  On the flip side, people who were raised in an environment that enables discrimination and racism will be more likely to accept it as normal behavior and pass down discriminatory habits to their children.

In addition, the children trusted their teacher and looked up to her, so when she told them all the nasty things about brown-eyed people, they quickly believed it.  This caused blue-eyed children to become confident and feel secure while pushing the brown-eyed students down and make them feel worthless and hopeless.  Once Elliott explained that no matter what differences we have we are to be judged by who we are on the inside, not by an exterior color or trait.  The students responded extremely well which led to better test scores, and more importantly better human interaction skills in a time when discrimination was a cultural norm.

Hope you enjoyed reading, as much as I enjoyed watching the documentary and taking part in this experience!

Please feel free to comment and add to the discussion!

Sincerely,

Stephen Watts

@jaylee4515

#COMM837S19