How Were Students Affected During the Brown Eye and Blue Eye Experiment
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On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott'due south 3rd-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. "Hey, Mrs. Elliott," Steven yelled equally he slung his books on his desk.
"They shot that King yesterday. Why'd they shoot that Rex?" All 28 children found their desks, and Elliott said she had something special for them to do, to brainstorm to understand the assassination of Martin Luther Rex Jr. the day earlier. "How do you remember information technology would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?" she asked the children, who were white. "It would be hard to know, wouldn't information technology, unless we really experienced discrimination ourselves. Would yous like to find out?"
A chorus of "Yeahs" went up, so began ane of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. Now, almost four decades afterward, 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 boondocks, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an do based on the experiment. (She prefers the term "exercise.") It is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. The textbook publisher McGraw-Loma has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others. Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. One scholar asserts that information technology is "Orwellian" and teaches whites "self-contempt." A columnist at a Denver paper called it "evil."
That spring morning 37 years agone, the blue-eyed children were set autonomously from the children with brown or light-green eyes. Elliott pulled out green construction newspaper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. "The browneyed people are the ameliorate people in this room," Elliott began. "They are cleaner and they are smarter."
She knew that the children weren't going to purchase her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more than scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. "Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused past a chemical," Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence. The more than melanin, the darker the person'south eyes—and the smarter the person. "Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, and then chocolate-brown-eyed people are amend than those with blue eyes," Elliott said. "Bluish-eyed people sit around and do nothing. You give them something nice and they just wreck it." She could experience a chasm forming betwixt the two groups of students.
"Practice blue-eyed people call up what they've been taught?" Elliott asked.
"No!" the brown-eyed kids said.
Elliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to employ paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. "Why?" one girl asked.
"Because we might catch something," a brown-eyed boy said. Everyone looked at Mrs. Elliott. She nodded. As the forenoon wore on, brown-eyed kids berated their bluish-eyed classmates. "Well, what do you lot expect from him, Mrs. Elliott," a dark-brown-eyed educatee said as a bluish-eyed student got an arithmetics problem wrong. "He's a bluey!"
And then, the inevitable: "Hey, Mrs. Elliott, how come you're the teacher if you've got blueish eyes?" a dark-brown-eyed male child asked. Before she could respond, some other boy piped up: "If she didn't take blue eyes, she'd exist the master or the superintendent."
At lunchtime, Elliott hurried to the teachers' lounge. She described to her colleagues what she'd done, remarking how several of her slower kids with brown optics had transformed themselves into confident leaders of the course. Withdrawn brown-eyed kids were suddenly approachable, some effulgent with the widest smiles she had e'er seen on them. She asked the other teachers what they were doing to bring news of the Rex bump-off into their classrooms. The answer, in a word, was nada.
Back in the classroom, Elliott's experiment had taken on a life of its ain. A smart blue-eyed girl who had never had issues with multiplication tables started making mistakes. She slumped. At recess, three brown-eyed girls ganged up on her. "You improve apologize to u.s.a. for getting in our way considering we're better than you are," one of the brownies said. The blue-eyed girl apologized.
On Mon, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the dark-brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy they were. Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blueys were much less nasty than the brown-eyed kids had been, mayhap considering the blueish-eyed kids had felt the sting of beingness ostracized and didn't want to inflict it on their erstwhile tormentors.
When the practice ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the Rex assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. Typical of their responses was that of Debbie Hughes, who reported that "the people in Mrs. Elliott's room who had brownish eyes got to discriminate confronting the people who had blue eyes. I have brownish eyes. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. I got to have v minutes actress of recess." The next solar day when the tables were turned, "I felt like quitting school. . . . I felt mad. That's what it feels like when you're discriminated against."
Elliott shared the essays with her mother, who showed them to the editor of the weekly Riceville Recorder. He printed them under the headline "How Bigotry Feels." The Associated Press followed up, quoting Elliott as saying she was "dumbfounded" by the exercise's effectiveness. "I think these children walked in a colored child'south moccasins for a day," she was quoted as proverb.
That might have been the terminate of it, merely a month later, Elliott says, Johnny Carson chosen her. "Would you similar to come on the show?" he asked.
Elliott flew to the NBC studio in New York City. On the "This evening Bear witness" Carson broke the water ice past spoofing Elliott's rural roots. "I sympathize this is the offset time you lot've flown?" Carson asked, grinning.
"On an airplane, it is," Elliott said to appreciative laughter from the studio audience. She chatted about the experiment, and earlier she knew information technology was whisked off the stage.
Hundreds of viewers wrote letters proverb Elliott'southward work appalled them. "How dare you endeavour this cruel experiment out on white children," ane said. "Black children grow upwardly accepted to such behavior, but white children, there's no style they could possibly empathize information technology. It'southward vicious to white children and will crusade them nifty psychological harm."
Elliott replied, "Why are we then worried near the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of fabricated-up racism ane mean solar day when blacks experience existent racism every day of their lives?"
The people of riceville did not exactly welcome Elliott home from New York with a hayride. Looking back, I retrieve part of the problem was that, like the residents of other small midwestern towns I've covered, many in Riceville felt that calling attention to oneself was poor manners, and that Elliott had shone a brilliant lite not only on herself only on Riceville; people all over the United States would retrieve Riceville was full of bigots. Some residents were furious.
When Elliott walked into the teachers' lounge the adjacent Mon, several teachers got up and walked out. When she went downtown to do errands, she heard whispers. She and her husband, Darald Elliott, and so a grocer, take 4 children, and they, too, felt a backfire. Their 12-year-old daughter, Mary, came habitation from school 1 day in tears, sobbing that her 6th-grade classmates had surrounded her in the school hallway and taunted her by maxim her mother would soon exist sleeping with black men. Brian, the Elliotts' oldest son, got beaten up at school, and Jane called the ringleader'southward
mother. "Your son got what he deserved," the adult female said. When Sarah, the Elliotts' oldest girl, went to the girls' bathroom in junior high, she came out of a stall to see a message scrawled in cherry-red lipstick on the mirror: "Nigger lover."
Elliott is nothing if not stubborn. She would conduct the exercise for the 9 more years she taught the third grade, and the next eight years she taught 7th and eighth graders earlier giving upwardly educational activity in Riceville, in 1985, largely to conduct the eye-colour exercise for groups exterior the school. In 1970, she demonstrated it for educators at a White House Conference on Children and Youth. ABC broadcast a documentary almost her work. She has led grooming sessions at General Electric, Exxon, AT&T, IBM and other corporations, and has lectured to the IRS, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Department of Education and the Postal Service. She has spoken at more than 350 colleges and universities. She has appeared on the "Oprah Winfrey Evidence" five times.
The fourth of v children, Elliott was born on her family'south farm in Riceville in 1933, and was delivered by her Irish-American father himself. She was ten before the farmhouse had running water and electricity. She attended a oneroom rural school.Today, at 72, Elliott, who has short white hair, a penetrating gaze and no-nonsense demeanor, shows no signs of slowing. She and Darald dissever their time between a converted schoolhouse in Osage, Iowa, a town 18 miles from Riceville, and a habitation near Riverside, California.
Elliott'southward friends and family say she's tenacious, and has e'er had a reformer's zeal. "She was an splendid school teacher, merely she has a style about her," says 90-yr-old Riceville native Patricia Bodenham, who has known Elliott since Jane was a infant. "She stirs people upwardly."
Vision and tenacity may become results, but they don't ever endear a person to her neighbors. "Mention ii words—Jane Elliott—and yous get a inundation of emotions from people," says Jim Cross, the Riceville Recorder's editor these days. "You tin come across the look on their faces. It brings up immediate anger and hatred."
When I met Elliott in 2003, she hadn't been back to Riceville in 12 years. We walked into the principal'south office at RicevilleElementary Schoolhouse, Elliott'south quondam haunt. The secretarial assistant on duty looked up, startled, as if she had only seen a ghost. "We want to run across Room No. x," Elliott said. Information technology was typical of Elliott's blunt style—no "Good morn," no small talk. The secretary said the south side of the building was airtight, something about waxing the hallways. "We but want to peek in," I volunteered. "We'll just be a couple of minutes."
Admittedly not. "This here is Jane Elliott," I said.
"She taught in this schoolhouse for 18 years."
"I know who she is."
We backed out. I was stunned. Elliott was not. "They tin can't forget me," she said, "and considering of who they are, they tin't forgive me."
Nosotros stopped on Woodlawn Artery, and a woman in her mid-40s approached u.s. on the sidewalk. "That you, Ms. Elliott?"
Jane shielded her optics from the morning sun. "Malinda? Malinda Whisenhunt?"
"Ms. Elliott, how are you?"
The two hugged, and Whisenhunt had tears streaming downwardly her cheeks. Now 45, she had been in Elliott's tertiary grade grade in 1969. "Let me look at yous," Elliott said. "You know, sweetheart, y'all haven't changed ane bit. You lot've still got that same sweet smile. And you'll always take it."
"I've never forgotten the exercise," Whisenhunt volunteered. "It changed my life. Not a day goes past without me thinking about information technology, Ms. Elliott. When my grandchildren are onetime enough, I'd give anything if you'd try the practice out on them. Would you? Could yous?"
Tears formed in the corners of Elliott'southward eyes.
The corn grows so fast in northern Iowa—from bulb to seven-pes-loftier stem in 12 weeks—that it crackles. In the early morning, dew and fog cover the acres of gently swaying stalks that environs Riceville the way water surrounds an island. The tallest construction in Riceville is the water belfry. The nearest traffic light is 20 miles away. The Hangout Bar & Grill, the Riceville Pharmacy and ATouch of Dutch, a eating place owned by Mennonites, line Main Street. In a grassy front one thousand down the cake is a hand-lettered sign: "Glads for Sale, 3 for $one." Folks leave their cars unlocked, keys in the ignition. Locals say that drivers don't signal when they turn because everyone knows where everyone else is going.
Most Riceville residents seem to have an stance of Elliott, whether or not they've met her. "Information technology'south the same thing over and once more," Cross says. "It'south Riceville 30 years ago. Some people feel we can't move on when you have her out there hawking her 30-twelvemonth-old experiment. It'south the Jane Elliott motorcar."
Walt Gabelmann, 83, was Riceville'due south mayor for 18 years beginning in 1966. "She could get kids to practice anything she wanted them to," he says of Elliott. "She got carried away past this possession she developed over human beings."
A former teacher, Ruth Setka, 79, said she was perchance the simply teacher who would withal talk to Elliott. "I think third class was too young for what she did. Inferior high, mayhap. Picayune children don't similar uproar in the classroom. And what she did caused an uproar. Anybody's tired of her. I'm tired of hearing about her and her experiment and how everyone here is a racist. That's non truthful. Let's only motion on."
Steve Harnack, 62, served as the elementary school primary beginning in 1977. "I don't think this community was ready for what she did," he said. "Maybe the fashion to sell the exercise would have been to invite the parents in, to talk about what she'd exist doing. You must go the parents offset."
Dean Weaver, seventy, superintendent of Riceville schools from 1972 to 1979, said, "She'd just go ahead and do things. She was a local girl and the other teachers were intimidated by her success. Jane would get invited to go to Timbuktu to requite a speech. That got the other teachers angry."
For years scholars have evaluated Elliott'southward practice, seeking to determine if it reduces racial prejudice in participants or poses a psychological risk to them. The results are mixed. Ii education professors in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, suggest that Elliott's experiment was unethical because the participants weren't informed of its existent purpose beforehand. Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, says Elliott'south diversity training is "Orwellian" and singled her out as "the Torquemada of thought reform." Kors writes that Elliott's practice taught "blood-guilt and cocky-contempt to whites," adding that "in her view, nothing has changed in America since the collapse of Reconstruction." In a similar vein, Linda Seebach, a conservative columnist for the Rocky Mount News, wrote in 2004 that Elliott was a "disgrace" and described her exercise as "sadistic," adding, "You would retrieve that any normal person would realize that she had washed an evil affair. Simply not Elliott. She repeated the abuse with subsequent classes, and finally turned information technology into a fully commercial enterprise."
Others have praised Elliott's exercise. In Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Practice the Right Things, educational psychologist Michele Borda says it "teaches our children to counter stereotypes before they become full-fledged, lasting prejudices and to recognize that every man existence has the correct to be treated with respect." Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George WashingtonUniversity, says the exercise helps develop character and empathy. And StanfordUniversity psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo writes in his 1979 textbook, Psychology and Life, that Elliott'southward "remarkable" experiment tried to evidence "how hands prejudiced attitudes may be formed and how arbitrary and illogical they can be." Zimbardo—creator of the also controversial 1971 Stanford Prisoner Experiment, which was stopped after college student volunteers interim as "guards" humiliated students acting as "prisoners"—says Elliott'south practise is "more compelling than many done by professional psychologists."
Elliott defends her work as a mother defends her kid. "You have to put the exercise in the context of the rest of the year. Yes, that twenty-four hours was tough. Yes, the children felt aroused, hurt, betrayed. Simply they returned to a better place—unlike a child of color, who gets abused every day, and never has the ability to find him or herself in a nurturing classroom environment." As for the criticism that the practice encourages children to distrust say-so figures—the teacher lies, and so recants the lies and maintains they were justified because of a greater practiced—she says she worked hard to rebuild her students' trust. The practice is "an inoculation confronting racism," she says. "We give our children shots to inoculate them against polio and smallpox, to protect them against the realities in the future. There are risks to those inoculations, as well, but we determine that those risks are worth taking."
Elliott says the role of a instructor is to enhance students' moral development. "That'south what I tried to teach, and that's what drove the other teachers crazy. Schoolhouse ought to be nigh developing character, only most teachers won't touch that with a 10-foot pole."
Elliott and I were sitting at her dining room table. The odour of the crops and loam and topsoil and manure wafted though the open door. Outside, rows of corn stretched to the horizon. "There'southward a sense of renewal here that I've never seen anywhere else," Elliott says.
Information technology occurs to me that for a teacher, the arrival of new students at the beginning of each school twelvemonth has a lot in common with the return of crops each summer.
Elliott continues, "Simply when you think that the fertile soil tin can sprout no more, another flavor comes round, and y'all see another year of bountiful crops, alpine and straight. It makes you proud."
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/
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