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For the actress who plays Tracy Quartermaine on General Hospital, please see Jane Elliot.
Jane Elliott (born ca. 1930) is an American teacher known for running an experiment with the children in her third grade classroom on April 6, 1968, two days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Mrs. Elliott divided her (all white) students based on eye color in order to demonstrate what racism is like. She ran the exercise in 14 of the 16 years she worked at the Riceville, Iowa school, and now travels around the world giving lectures and re-running the exercise (usually with adults).
Her Experiment worked extremely well on the children. In the original experiment, she told the children she was going to show them what racism was like, and then proceeded to tell them that blue eyed people were better than brown eyed people. There were immediate effects. The students with brown eyes tried to deny it at first, but she insisted. They began to slouch down, and perform worse. They wouldn't pay as much attention in class, and would hide their heads. At recess, one of them punched a blue eyed student because he called him "brown eyes". The next day, she switched the experiment around, and told the class she had made a mistake, and that brown eyed people were really better than blue eyed people. The effects immediately changed. The students adjusted to fit their roles accordingly. The students even performed better on spelling tests when in the "higher" position, showing that people adjust to the expectations of them. Her studies on adults worked as well as they did with the children. Often the "victims" became violent and argumentative, and it just further led to prove her point. Her work is very controversial and her experiment could not be performed on children today.
References
- A Class Divided. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/) Frontline
- [1] (http://www.magenta.nl/EyetoEye/contraste.html)
- [2] (http://www.magenta.nl/boat/quotes.html)
- [3] (http://www.newsreel.org/films/blueeyed.htm)
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