Bates 1
Mia Bates
Robin Littell
GSW 105
October 25 2016
“A Class Divided” Reflection
During the Sixties, Martin Luther King Jr., an incredibly necessary and influential Civil
Rights activist, was shot and killed, and the reaction of one teacher was unlike any other. She
took an experimental approach many would deem unethical. Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher in
a small, Iowa town, told her students that melanin was what determined intelligence. She went
on to tell them that blue-eyed people are better in virtually every way than people with brown
eyes. This information affected everything that happened in class that Friday. Students weren’t
supposed to play with children of the other eye color at recess; the brown eyed weren’t even
allowed to use the play structure at all. Having blue eyes came with perks (five additional
minutes on the playground) and having brown eyes had extra drawbacks (having to use paper
cups instead of the water fountain). Some children were encouraged and praised while others
were publicly criticized the the teacher they all trusted and looked up to. Although the exercise
was and still is so controversial, the issues raised and impact on the participants is absolutely
imperative in beginning to understand discrimination.
When discussing the activity Jane Elliott first tried with her third grade students, many
people respond negatively, proposing that the experiment was unethical and unfair to the
children. In actual scientific experiments, ethics are always a concern. One point is that before
the exercise began, a student asked why Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Elliott asked if the
