Jane Elliot And Stereotypes

In 1968, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jane Elliot, a third grade teacher, decided to conduct an experiment with her students on race, discrimination and bigotry. She conducted this experiment by splitting the class into two individual groups, the blue-eyed group and the brown-eyed group. The first day of the experiment, Tuesday, Elliot suggested that the blue-eyed children were the superior group. They were allowed extra time at recess, seconds at lunch, drink right from the fountain and were not allowed to play with the brown-eyed children. The brown-eyed children were to wear a collar that identified them. The next day, Wednesday, the roles were reversed. The blue-eyed children were no longer the better or superior, but the brown eyed-children were. During the course of the two days Elliot

It was amazing to see how the children were able to identify their roles as superior or inferior and slip right into behaving according to these classifications. Even when roles switched the children had not trouble taking on their roles as bigots even though they themselves experienced the discrimination just the day before. The children started referring to each other as “brown eyes” or “blue eyes” instead of by names although they may have been friends. One child explicitly referenced this to the use of the “n word” against African Americans. Not only did the behavior of student to each other change in a degrading way but the less superior group began to demonstrate poor behavior such as retaliation to being called names and their academic performance was lower than that of the other group. Elliot had found in her study that the stress and all the other issues of being discriminated against interfered with the ability to perform well. At the end of the two day experiment the children described their experience as “a dog on a leash” and “feeling like they are in