When the exercise ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blueys were much less nasty than the brown-eyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn't want to inflict it on their former tormentors. On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy they were. "You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we're better than you are," one of the brownies said. At recess, three brown-eyed girls ganged up on her. A smart blue-eyed girl who had never had problems with multiplication tables started making mistakes. The answer, in a word, was nothing.īack in the classroom, Elliott's experiment had taken on a life of its own. She asked the other teachers what they were doing to bring news of the King assassination into their classrooms. Withdrawn brown-eyed kids were suddenly outgoing, some beaming with the widest smiles she had ever seen on them. She described to her colleagues what she'd done, remarking how several of her slower kids with brown eyes had transformed themselves into confident leaders of the class. Before she could answer, another boy piped up: "If she didn't have blue eyes, she'd be the principal or the superintendent."Īt lunchtime, Elliott hurried to the teachers' lounge. Elliott, how come you're the teacher if you've got blue eyes?" a brown-eyed boy asked. Elliott," a brown-eyed student said as a blue-eyed student got an arithmetic problem wrong. As the morning wore on, brown-eyed kids berated their blue-eyed classmates. "Because we might catch something," a brown-eyed boy said. "Do blue-eyed people remember what they've been taught?" Elliott asked.Įlliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. You give them something nice and they just wreck it." She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students. "Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. "Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes," Elliott said. The more melanin, the darker the person's eyes-and the smarter the person. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence.
Life time fitness skin#
"Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical," Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. She knew that the children weren't going to buy her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. "The browneyed people are the better people in this room," Elliott began. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. One scholar asserts that it is "Orwellian" and teaches whites "self-contempt." A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it "evil." Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. (She prefers the term "exercise.") It is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. Now, almost four decades later, Elliott's experiment still matters-to the grown children with whom she experimented, to the people of Riceville, population 840, who all but ran her out of town, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an exercise based on the experiment.
Would you like to find out?"Ī chorus of "Yeahs" went up, and so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. "It would be hard to know, wouldn't it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. "How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?" she asked the children, who were white.
Why'd they shoot that King?" All 28 children found their desks, and Elliott said she had something special for them to do, to begin to understand the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Elliott," Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk. On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott's third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa.
0 kommentar(er)
