Discrimination In Ms. Elliot's Assassination

After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In April of 1968, a third grade teacher from a small, whites only town of Riceville, Iowa walked into class confounded and disturbed. The class had recently made Martin Luther King Jr. The hero of the month. Therefore, the students and Ms. Elliot could not fathom why anyone would want to harm Mr. King. The assassination made her decide to teach her students a very challenging lesson on the significance of the word discrimination. This lesson would show the students how it felt to be discriminated against, and how it changed individuals.

The experiment consisted of the class being divided by eye color. The first day of the experiment, the students that had blue eyes, were advised that they

Elliott did not stop there with her experiment. She did the experiment in her new classes in the next year. She recorded her 1970 students as the experiment went on. Sixteen years later, they had a class reunion. During this class reunion, the previous students watched themselves on the video and discussed the way the experiment performed by Ms. Elliot shaped them. This was the first time Ms. Elliot got to see if her lesson went to good use or not. The experiment really opened their eyes. One student even said that she wished she could put the collar on people that discriminate so they would feel what she felt when she went through the experiment.

At the end of the video, the cameras followed Ms. Elliott as she goes to practice her experiment on the workers of the Iowa prison system. She takes all day long to teach the same lesson to adults instead of third graders. Even though, there was a big age difference, the experiment still showed the same results as before. The workers ' attitudes was very similar to the

Not many people took into consideration what discrimination could do to people. I love the fact that she went out of her way to teach her students that discriminating actually hurt, and not just being a victim of it, but also being the one doing it. It could turn a sweet soul into a deviant one. It was also shocking how the students really did not know their attitudes changed until after they stepped back and observed. I believe that this experiment/ lesson should be taught more often, because there is still discrimination going on till this day. Once someone knows how it feels to be put down because of their eye color, ethnicity, or how much money they have, or whatever the circumstance may be, they would not ever what to be put in that predicament again. It can be all fun and games until the person doing the discriminating gets hurt too. She also tried the experiment on adults, which showed the same behavior as the third graders. I thought that was pretty interesting, because that basically said that age doesn’t mean anything, we all can be infected with this evilness. If this was taught to people more often, I honestly think that there would be less of this problem in the world. People would open their eyes and realize that how you treat someone can cause long term damage. Ms. Elliot realized that something needed to be done and she reacted in a pleasant way. Even though, what she did was something small