Jane Elliot and Social Discrimination

Tiara Jefferson
Criminal Justice, South Arkansas Community College
Jessica Brown
March 6, 2022

Jane Elliot, a third-grade teacher, performed an experiment with her students to teach
them about the effects of segregation. Elliot divided her class based on their eye color to show
how people are treated differently around the world. She tried to figure out how to explain global
racism in a way that third graders could understand. Jane Elliot's 'The Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes
Experiment' was unreliable because she created a closed environment in a third-grade study hall.
She divided the class into two groups, based on eye color, and told the kids that one group was
superior to the other. She drew attention to flaws in one of the eyes and linked them to their eye
tones. The understudies had deceived each other, and the companions began to fight. The test
turned out to be a success, but the strategy used in the program today would be considered
unethical. The investigation's outcomes vastly outweighed the harm that had been done. The
understudies varied from having the best eye tone and looking like a minority. When there was a
disagreement among the students, she handled it and made the students think about why they
were looking down on their classmates. Each understudy discovered what it was like to be a
minority, which clarified the kids' perspectives on discrimination; they realized that it mattered
more who people were inside than their skin tone. I would not change a single thing Elliott did.
She did not teach the children anything new but instead, she showed them interaction. An
adventure that has stayed with them throughout their lives and continues to educate them as the
understudies now demonstrate to their kids. When Jane Elliott conducted the experiment with
adults, who were originally her students, she had the blue-eyed group wait outside for about
thirty minutes before entering the room, causing the brown-eyed group to believe that the other
group was late, disrespectful, and unwilling to participate in the demonstration. Adults, like the
understudies in Elliot's original investigation, began to accept that they were superior to others
and, surprise, exhibited a preference for the negative characteristics of the other group. One
woman became enraged with Elliott because of how she was making the brown eye colored
gathering feel dominant and belittling the blue gathering.
 Works Cited
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/karinabland/2017/11/17/blue-eyes-brown-eyes-jane-
elliotts-exercise-race-50-years-later/860287001/