Discrimination: The Learned
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) A class divided is a social experiment conducted by Jane Elliot a third grade teacher in 1968 following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jane Elliot was trying to talk to her class about discrimination and prejudice and felt as if the message was not getting across to her class. Being from the rural area her children did not have the chance to interact with african americans and she wanted to reinforce the severity and concept of discrimination and prejudice in the classroom. The experiment at hand shows how discrimination can be a learned behavior that is influenced by an authoritative figure. The experiment will be broken down into psychology factors that contribute to discrimination. As well as the analyzation of the experiment and identify the correlation between the two.
The Experiment
The way the experiment is setup was geniously done, Jane Elliot created an almost pseudo society within her classroom of third graders. First Elliot created hostility by saying that people with blue eyes were superior to those with brown. She then started to create a sense of
…show more content…
She not only supported the word of diversity but helped shaped the future generations. Elliot a supporter of MLK Jr. is a great woman and I am shocked I just found out about her. I watched this story in sociology class a week before I wrote this paper. My teacher, Mr. Ovaska of course asked the class “How many of you have seen this” one kid said he had out of a solid thirdy. Shocking to how impactful this story was to me and others, this film is a spread of education, instead of hatred and the down put of others let's spread knowledge and freedom to